Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong Archive

By Gleb Albert, 2018 Strong Research Fellow
In September 2018, I had the chance to go to Rochester and work at The Strong, thanks to its generous research fellowship program.  My postdoctoral research project deals with the history of computer games piracy in the 1980s and early 1990s as a subculture phenomenon. I look at the so-called “crackers”—amateur computer users who removed copy protection routines from games and circulated the modified versions to gain fame and beat the competition—their […]

Continue Reading about Piracy and the Computer Games Industry Published on:
September 23, 2019

Just after Thanksgiving of 2018, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks at The Strong museum on a Valentine-Cosman fellowship. I wanted to know how board games mirror our understanding of ourselves, and how that understanding has changed over the last half-century or so.
I arrived on a chilly morning in Rochester to what the newscasters were calling “nuisance snow”—just enough to make driving annoying but not enough to shut anything down for these hardy Upstate New York folks—and was […]

Continue Reading about Out of the Kitchen: Board Games and Our Complicated Identities Published on:
September 13, 2019

When’s the last time you thought about everyone’s favorite old-fashioned magnetic media storage device, the floppy disk? Has it been years? Decades? Or never? With our experience today backing up onto cloud storage, shared folders, and USB drives, people seem to have forgotten how difficult saving your digital files used to be. In the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong, our archival collections contain hundreds of floppy disks which hold game design documentation, graphics, text […]

Continue Reading about Floppy Disks in the 21st Century Published on:
August 9, 2019

In March 2019, we spent two days at The Strong conducting research related to Intellivision, a home video game system produced by Mattel Electronics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We have beenworking on this project off and on for almost five years and expect it to lead to a book tentatively titled Intelligent Visions. As our research progressed, it became increasingly apparent that we needed archival materials to round out our analysis of Intellivision and its significance. We […]

Continue Reading about Intellivision in the Archive Published on:
July 31, 2019

Ken Fedesna, former Executive Vice President and General Manager at video game developers and publishers Bally/Williams/Midway/Atari Games, has donated a collection that documents the history of Midway Games and showcases the company’s work on the TouchMaster line of multigame touchscreen video game units and projects related to connecting their coin-operated games through the internet. Fedesna joined Williams Electronics in 1977 and, over his 27 years with that company and Bally/Midway, he managed the development of countless pinball machines, […]

Continue Reading about Ken Fedesna Donation Documents Video Game Developer and Publisher Midway Games Published on:
July 12, 2019

In May I had the good fortune to spend two weeks as a research fellow at the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, which sits atop the too-tempting playground of The Strong National Museum of Play. My objective: to capture, using only my iPhone, every last page of Chris Kohler’s collection of 300+ fanzines. Note to future fellows: a two-minute stretch routine will help prevent back pain!
Now an editor at Kotaku and formerly of Wired, a teenage Kohler got […]

Continue Reading about Paper, Please: What I’ve Learned (So Far) from Three Decades of Video Game Fanzines Published on:
June 28, 2019

The histories of tabletop games and video games are deeply woven together. Analog and digital games often share similar mechanics (such as experience points) or similar settings (e.g. dungeon crawling). Many times in the past, game makers have ported titles from one medium to the other. And yet perhaps the most crucial connection between analog and video games lies in the personal biographies of many game designers, who often began work with board games before applying their skills to the […]

Continue Reading about Paul Reiche III Papers at The Strong Published on:
June 20, 2019

In Part I of my skateboarding blog series, I discussed how the first big wave of skateboarding took place from 1959 to 1965, and then skateboarding went mainly “underground” from about 1966 to 1972. Part II told about how the introduction of Frank Nasworthy’s durable composite “Cadillac Wheels” enhanced the skateboarding experience, leading to the second big wave of skateboarding between 1973 to 1981. The third wave of skateboarding extended from 1983 to 1991 when famous skaters Tony Hawk (vert […]

Continue Reading about Sidewalk Surfing: The Gnarly History of Skateboarding Part III (1994 to 2019) Published on:
May 31, 2019

A short time ago, in an archive a few states away, I had the pleasure of exploring the far reaches of space—as represented in video games. I am working on a dissertation project examining the role of outer space in the history of the American video game industry. This has meant a lot of rewarding hours spent poring over design documents, reading internal memos, hazarding the tunnels to the fabled City of Myster  y in Vanguard, and smashing millions of […]

Continue Reading about Space to Play: A Cosmic History of Video Games Published on:
May 24, 2019