I’ve admired The Strong’s vintage Drive-Mobile arcade game since the first time I stood in front of it with Martin Reinhardt, the museum’s arcade game conservation technician. It was exciting to see how the first arcade driving game—a popular and enduring genre—actually worked. Martin opened the back of the game for me and demonstrated the mutoscope drum design in action. Early mutoscope machines contained a revolving flipbook on a spindle to create the illusion of a moving image when a […]
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The Strong Launches Women in Games Initiative
For many decades, women have played key roles in the design, production, manufacture, marketing, and writing of video games, and yet their history in the gaming industry is too little preserved and too often underappreciated. The Strong’s Women in Games initiative will document and celebrate these crucial contributions through a concerted effort to collect, preserve, and interpret artifacts and archival material related to women in gaming. The Strong will feature many of these materials in an onsite and online exhibit […]
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Following The Bouncing Ball: Tennis for Two…at The Strong!
On October 18, 1958, a curious object appeared at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) during its annual Visitor’s Day. Unlike the static (mainly photo and text) displays arranged to showcase projects from BNL’s different lab divisions, this unnamed object from the Instrumentation Division consisted of a 5½ inch DuMont cathode ray tube X-Y graphic oscilloscope connected to a Donner Scientific Company Model 30 (vacuum tube) analog computer. Upon the small screen, visitors witnessed images of a “net,” “court,” and “ball” […]
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A History of Film-to-Game Adaptations: Why I Play, Study, and (Sometimes) Like Bad Games
In October 2015, I was awarded a Research Fellowship from The Strong. I had access to the library, the archives, the museum itself, and the seemingly endless rows of shelves full of playthings of the past. Both my 14-year-old self and my current 30-something researcher self were in a happy place. My job is to study video games and teach about them—not a bad gig at all, I must admit—and I have been interested in the history and theory of […]
Barbie Hacks and Mods: On Swapping Voices, Removing Makeup, and Fighting Prejudice
Barbie has raised eyebrows since her debut at the 1959 Toy Fair. Modeled after the German Bild Lilli novelty doll, Barbie provided girls a playroom outlet for their dreams and aspirations. Inventor Ruth Handler knew that girls wanted to play at more than being a mother to life-sized baby dolls, but Mattel executives were skeptical. In the end, Handler was right and had the sales numbers to prove it. Little girls all over the country wanted to play at being […]
“He Shoots! He Scores!”: Hockey Games for the Off-Season
Being a fan of a professional sports team can be a lot of work. Sure, you can casually flip through the television channels on a Sunday afternoon and watch a few minutes of football, or you can accept some free tickets to a baseball game just to appreciate the sunshine and some stadium hot dogs, but folks who call themselves “die-hard fans” really take their enjoyment of sports to a different level.
As a lifelong Pittsburgher now living in Rochester, NY, […]
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A Shopping We Will Go…
Shopping. Chances are that word triggers a sensation of either joy or dread in your brain. Love it or loathe it, shopping plays a pretty hefty role in most of our lives, whether it’s a quick trip to the market for some essentials or a day-long event to find that one perfect item. Regardless of your shopping style—necessity or hobby—it’s hard to ignore that shopping represents a large part of our everyday culture, including how we play.
At The Strong, one […]
My Year with Atari
Last year, I began processing the Atari Coin-Op Division records, a massive collection The Strong acquired in June 2014. These materials were previously held by a collector who purchased them in 2003 through a sealed-bid auction as Atari Games was liquidating its assets. Housed in four different storage facilities for 11 years, the materials arrived at the museum in boxes that filled 23 wooden pallets. Unloaded from a semi, the pallets went to the climate-controlled storage facility on the museum’s […]
What Do Pinball and Jiminy Cricket Have in Common?
Before I came to The Strong, my exposure to pinball had been limited to the Barbie Shakin’ Pinball handheld video game that I received for Christmas 1995. I have definitely come a long way in my pinball knowledge since then, from learning the proper terms for components I never knew existed (pop bumpers are my favorite) to discovering the game’s tumultuous and sometimes scandalous past (mob connections, anyone?). Once I saw the machines up close, I became fascinated with the […]
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