Being on the Collections team at The Strong museum means that there’s never a dull moment. We are continually receiving boxes and boxes (and sometimes pallets) of toy, game, doll, and electronic game-related objects, as well as related ephemera and papers. A unique artifact being cataloged will catch the eye of a colleague, and a discussion of its significance (or a fond trip down memory lane) will ensue. Occasionally, a large collection may take quite some time to fully catalog […]
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Lucia Grossberger Morales: Computer Art Pioneer
Computers are amazing machines. They can be serious tools for business or scientific research or they can be platforms for play. For many people, this has meant using computers to play games, but computers have also often served as engines for other forms of creative expression. Lucia Grossberger Morales is one example of someone who, in the early 1980s, not only employed the Apple II to create innovative art but designed a program, The Designer’sToolkit, to help others […]
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Video Game Press Kits as Historical Sources
Each year since 1967 (and twice a year between 1978 and 1994), throngs of people crowd the floors of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), eager to get a first look at the latest technological trends. In the early 1980s as video game developers such as Atari, Mattel, Imagic, General Consumer Electronics (GCE), Activision, and others vied for a share of the booming video game market, publicity teams assembled and handed out carefully curated folders filled with information about […]
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Ninja Princess and the Erasure of Women in Video Games
While working on The Strong’s exhibit on the history of women in the video game industry, I decided to do some research into the earliest examples of playable female characters. I already knew I’d be including some beloved favorites, such as Midway’s Ms. Pac-Man (1982) and Nintendo’s Samus Aran from Metroid (1986). Others were new to me, such as the titular character from the game Lady Bug (1981), a maze game by Universal Entertainment Corporation and the first example of […]
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Game Development Is a Harsh Mistress
Making a video game can take months or even years to create from start to finish. It isn’t always a straightforward process either: character designs change, stories get rewritten, and entire gameplay mechanics are removed or added throughout the development process. But sometimes all the hard work, sweat, and tears that go into making a game doesn’t end with a product on the shelf. Sometimes, a game’s release is cancelled.
In 2016, Interplay Entertainment founder Brian Fargo donated a […]
Switches and Screens: Researching Video Game Interface Design
In Will Wright’s game design documents for SimCity (1989), he wrote on his graph paper pad, “Interface?” Around the word, Wright drew a box, as if to highlight it. On the rest of the page, there are a random assortment of notes: “Fixed / Mobile Cursor,” “Navigate / Edit / Tool Select.” On the page, Wright also drew a series of arrows that show early design possibilities for the buttons used in SimCity to rotate buildings or move […]
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Documenting the Skylanders Story
It began with a phone call from Paul Reiche III last summer.
I’ve known Paul since hearing him at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2012 tell the story of the creation of the Skylanders line of toy-to-life video games. I loved his enthusiasm for video games, tabletop games, and toys, a passion that fueled pioneering work in those fields from his time at TSR in the 1970s working on Dungeons & Dragons to his many years in the video game business; […]
Game Saves: Preserving the First LGBTQ Electronic Game
Floppy diskettes are an incredibly volatile medium. Available in multiple shapes, sizes, and formats, the magnetic disks were often used, rewritten, and eventually tossed aside as new methods of data storage arrived. Disks by their very nature are disposable, and younger generations may only recognize a floppy disk as a save icon. With some experts estimating the lifespan of a floppy disk at 10 to 20 years under the best conditions, many pieces of software, including games, are at risk.
Caper […]
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An Expansion Pack for A History of Video Games in 64 Objects
In our new book from the World Video Game Hall of Fame, A History of Video Games in 64 Objects, we faced a challenge. Which objects should we include? The Strong museum, home of the World Video Game Hall of Fame, has hundreds of thousands of objects related to video games in its collections, and so we needed to include just the right mix of artifacts that were important, helped tell the broader history of video games, and would engage […]
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