I came to The Strong Museum to study Carmen Sandiego, the shadowy villain who stars in one of the most successful educational game series in video game history, but I left knowing a lot more about the early days of the educational game industry.
I am a Latinx literature scholar and lifelong gamer, whose research has been focused primarily on AfroLatinx literature and culture (my first book came out in June 2024). My research on Miles Morales and the Latino legacy of […]
Game Shows Have Scripts?
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
The National Archives of Game Show History has been fortunate to have many eager contributors donate their prized possessions to be preserved. Among the many treasures that have been donated: set pieces, handheld props, question cards, photographs and slides, tickets, and scripts.
“Wait a minute, scripts? Game shows have scripts?” you might be asking.
Game shows do have scripts, but not in the sense you’re thinking. It’s important for everyone […]
Role-Playing with Sound: A Sonic History of Tabletop Role-Playing Games
A crack of thunder. The rattling of chains. Roars of monsters in the depths. A song to guide your way. These words stoke our imaginations and illustrate how stories are told via the evocation of sound. When people imagine playing a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) such as Dungeons & Dragons, they envision people in costume rolling dice, moving small, hand-painted figurines, and navigating sprawling maps of the dungeons that are being delved.
In addition to these material components, however, at the […]
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Pinball at The Strong Museum
Why pinball? This is the question that people repeatedly ask me when I state that my dissertation investigates pinball’s history. When I explain that I am a PhD candidate in NYU’s Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, people become even more confused. What does pinball have to do with cinema? And is it worthy of a book length treatment? I answer those questions by replying that pinball is one of the most controversial American games, hence my title for my […]
Why Celebrities Like Game Shows
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
“What’s in it for THEM?”
Have you ever watched Password, The $100,000 Pyramid, Match Game, or any other celebrity game shows and wondered why the celebrities are there? They can’t win the car, the cash, nor the washer/dryer combo, and with the workload involved for the TV shows on which they’re already appearing regularly as cast members, being on a game show is costing them a precious day off. A […]
Contact Moments with Japanese Game Magazines at The Strong Museum
On a snowy winter day in January 2024 at The Strong National Museum of Play, I read about the far-off land of Hyrule, inhabited by fiery dragons, rock-monster-people, and evil twin-sister witches. I pored over issues of Weekly Famitsu, the most popular Japanese gaming magazine, looking at their coverage of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. On page 89 of issue no. 507, I see the heading 謎の少年の正体が明らかにされる? (roughly: “Will the identity of the mysterious boy be revealed?”), with […]
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Birth of the Modern Game Show
By Bob Boden, co-founder of the National Archives of Game Show History
On September 4, 1998, ITV network in the United Kingdom premiered a one-hour primetime game show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It featured one contestant, sitting across from host Chris Tarrant, answering up to 15 multiple choice general knowledge questions of increasing values, from £100 to a top prize of £1 million. As long as the player answered questions correctly, they could remain in the “hot […]
Scrabble: A Television Hit?
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
Board games and television don’t seem like they would go together. It would be hard to imagine millions of viewers tuning in regularly to watch people play a game of Risk or Settlers of Cattan. But 40 years ago this month, viewers across the country had a six-year-long daily habit of watching people play Scrabble every day on NBC.
The Scrabble game show originated with Exposure Unlimited, a prize […]
S-T-R-O-N-G: Investigating the History of the Ouija Board at The Strong Museum
The Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1890. Its development and success were closely tied to the rise of the American Spiritualist movement following the Civil War, but the men who patented and popularized the divination tool as a board game were not Spiritualists, but capitalists. At a time when the desire to contact the dead had coalesced into a religious movement, a group of entrepreneurs including Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond […]