Electronic Games Archive

In 1980, American youth raced to their television sets on Saturday mornings, not for cartoons, but to play Space Invaders on their Atari 2600s. Fast forward to today, where players worldwide coordinate across time zones to join massive multiplayer matches in Fortnite’s shared virtual world, using devices ranging from smartphones to gaming consoles. The contrast is staggering in comparison to a mere 44 years ago. This then begs the question: how did what began as a hobbyist pursuit in the […]

Continue Reading about From Space Invaders to Fortnite: A Look Back at the Evolution of Video Gaming Published on:
April 18, 2025

Contemporary travel is a special kind of pandemonium, an admixture of excitement, fear, consumerism, and intense security measures. It can be a rather playful experience too, particularly in the U.S. The stops that took me from Pullman, Washington, where currently I live and work, to The Strong National Museum of Play are a case in point. First it was Pullman to Spokane, then it was Spokane to Las Vegas, where I transferred to a flight to Rochester, New York. To […]

Continue Reading about Relational Play Published on:
March 28, 2025

My previous blog post explored the emergence of video game Westerns in the 1970s. Driven by a mixture of technological limitations and public familiarity with Westerns and electromechanical shooting games, these new video game Westerns asked players to take on the role of the gunfighter in a relatively small digital world. Set in the mythic West of films, television, and novels, these games relied heavily on visual symbols such as pixelated covered wagons, cowboy hats, and pistols in arcade games […]

Continue Reading about Gunfighter Gaming: A History of the Video Game Western Part 2 (1984 to 1994) Published on:
February 7, 2025

Having been born in the 1990s, I grew up during an era of growing availability of home computers and internet. Each new piece of technology, software, and online game was a novelty. I remember buying the Catz 5 and Dogz 5 games before we had a computer capable of running them and reading the manuals over and over until I could finally play. The advent of online gaming sites, especially those geared toward children, holds the most nostalgia for me. […]

Continue Reading about Beyond Banner Ads (My Neopet Loves McDonalds) Published on:
January 31, 2025

In August and September 2024, I had the chance to work in the exhibits and archives of The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Coming from Switzerland, a country in which the historical study and preservation of video games is still in its early stages, I was impressed by the wealth and the diversity of objects held by this institution.
As part of my doctoral research, I’m working mainly on video games designed for the domestic space, i.e. […]

Continue Reading about Game Instructions: How Do You Learn to Play in an Arcade Room? Published on:
January 17, 2025

From Dungeons & Dragons (1974) to Elden Ring (2023), modern games have asked us time and again to crack our knuckles, dust off our wizard cloaks, and test our magical mettle against fantasy’s most fearsome foes. But for all the magic our in-game spellbooks may contain, it was the pages of video game magazines that had the power to skyrocket an obscure game to national acclaim—or rain financial ruin upon a decorated studio for its latest flop. But how did […]

Continue Reading about Let’s Talk About Something Fun—How About Magic? Published on:
January 10, 2025

Released in 1994, the PC-FX was a 32-bit home video game console developed by NEC and Hudson Soft. The PC-FX was preceded by the TurboDuo (PC Engine Duo in Japan) and the PC Engine SuperGrafx (never released outside of Japan), and both were 16-bit fourth generation systems. The PC-FX’s computer tower-esque aesthetic of its console and its liberal use of full motion video in its games made it stand out among the fifth-generation video game consoles. Ultimately, however, its high […]

Continue Reading about Japanese Games at the Strong, Part III (PC-FX) Published on:
November 8, 2024

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 […]

Continue Reading about Pinball at The Strong Museum Published on:
September 11, 2024

Those of us with large data storage needs today are spoiled, with hard drives totaling over 20 terabytes, and options like remote cloud storage offer virtually unlimited storage, if you are willing to pay. Step back to 1998, and things were quite different. According to one source, a 12-gigabyte hard drive cost $349 (the equivalent of more than $650 in 2024).
While 12 gigabytes of storage was large for the time, hard drives were not the only solution for data storage. […]

Continue Reading about What’s in a (Data) Tape? Published on:
August 15, 2024