As I stood outside The Strong’s new permanent Pinball Playfields exhibit, I couldn’t help but see and overhear our guests’ reactions to the flashing lights and distinct pops and thumps of the pinball machines. “Pinball! Yes!” I heard someone cheer. Another guest who noticed I worked at the museum stopped to tell me, “You’ve made my husband very happy.” As I watched smiling children, young families, and adults play in the exhibit, I heard another person ask a companion, “They […]
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Atari Packaging Design Collection Documents the Art of Selling Video Games
The Strong has acquired a collection of more than 2,000 drawings, photographs, mock-ups, proofs, and other materials related to the design and production of Atari home and handheld game packaging and user manuals from 1976–1984. The Cort and Barbara Allen Atari Packaging Design Collection, 1976–1984, documents how the company’s artists, designers, and writers developed and created the distinctive packages and manuals for some of the earliest and most popular home video game titles of the later 20th century.
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The Williams Pinball Playfield Design Collection
Pioneering Chicago-based gaming company Williams Electronics Games, Inc. donated the Williams Pinball Playfield Design Collection, 1946–1995 to The Strong. The collection consists of more than 200 original drawings of playfields (the pinball machines’ surface where the ball rolls) layouts (with a nearly complete set of sketches from 1947 to 1971), hundreds of mechanical drawings of parts assemblies, and numerous examples of pinball concept artwork. Collectively, these one-of-a-kind materials document how Williams created their games and how playfield designs evolved […]
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Star Wars and Atari: Documentation of a Classic Arcade Game
Earlier this year, I joined The Strong to perform a truly exciting job: process the recently acquired Atari Coin-Op Division Collection. I loved Atari as a child, so I jumped at the chance to work firsthand on its records. My first exposure to video games, like many others born in the early 1980s, came through classic Atari games such as Pole Position, Asteroids, and Super Breakout. I was too young to experience these titles at the local arcade, but I […]
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I Want YOU (to Test Your Grip): Uncle Sam as Arcade Icon
Stern Pinball’s recent announcement of a new line of KISS pinball machines “honoring one of the most influential and iconic rock bands of all time,” reminded me how frequently today’s coin-operated amusement games center on licensed brands, revered characters, and cultural icons. Other recent examples include Stern’s The Avengers (2012) and Mustang (2014) and Raw Thrills’s Batman (2013). Yet arcade and pinball manufacturers have always produced games that capitalized on popular cultural trends and recognizable characters, even including Uncle Sam.
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Simon Says: Thanks, Ralph
I was deeply saddened to hear that Ralph H. Baer had died on December 6, 2014, at the age of 92. As numerous other writers have noted, Ralph invented the “Brown Box” home video game console (produced as the Magnavox Odyssey) and the electronic game Simon. He donated his professional papers to The Strong, and I had the privilege of processing them in 2013. Ralph’s papers spanned more than 40 years of his lengthy career in the toy and game […]
Remembering Ralph
I lost a friend this past weekend.
I first got to know Ralph Baer a little over seven years ago when he reached out to us at The Strong to see if we might be interested in preserving materials documenting his lifework. We, of course, were interested—after all, he was a legend, the man who patented the idea of playing a game on a television, the creator of the first home video game system, and the inventor of Simon, one […]
A Second Revolution in Game Distribution
Biologists who study the fossil record note that dramatic blooms in the number and diversity of species interrupt long periods of stasis or gradual change in animal forms. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould termed this phenomenon “punctuated equilibrium” and wrote a book, Wonderful Life, about the sudden efflorescence of fossils during the Cambrian period about 550 million years ago. Interestingly, despite the drastic difference in timescales, this phenomenon has a parallel in the history of games, for at certain times the […]
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Screen-Play: Video Game Mania on Television
“Finish him!” “Save the princess!” “Time is running out!” Video game designers excel at creating high-stakes environments. And television has earned some laughs depicting the obsessive players who heed these calls to action. Here are some of the memorable ways television shows have turned video games into life-or-death situations.
Seinfeld: “The Frogger”
George holds the high score on the video arcade machine at a pizzeria that’s going out of business. “I’m never gonna have a child,” he tells Kramer. “If I lose […]
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