Electronic Games Archive

Eight months, 169 boxes, 1,270 folders, 1,314 objects, and a partridge in a pear tree. Minus the bird, these statistics hint at just how large the archives of video game pioneer Don Daglow are and how long it took to prepare them for research use at The Strong’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. This collection of video game concepts, development papers, original artwork, never-released game demos, and Stormfront Studios company records provides a behind-the-scenes look at […]

Continue Reading about Unboxing the Past: The Don Daglow Papers Published on:
June 11, 2020

Since 2017, The Strong has directed significant energy toward our Women in Games initiative, which documents and celebrates the crucial contributions of women to the electronic games industry. Under the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG), the initiative builds upon the holdings of museum artifacts and archival records which illustrate the impact of women in the field. (If you attended the Women in Games: Inspire! or Women in Games: Create! programs in 2018 or 2019, […]

Continue Reading about Building a Mystery—Spotlight on Jane Jensen Published on:
June 5, 2020

I recently revisited World Video Game Hall of Fame inductee The Oregon Trail, traveling west with extra oxen, plenty of bullets, and cash to spare. My colleague Laurie was laid up with typhoid, and Jo died of cholera near Independence Rock. I succumbed to the same malady before South Pass, alas! I think I started too late in summer because finding water became an issue, but I still had plenty of bullets. Despite criticism aimed at its biases, […]

Continue Reading about A 1927 Board Game Prefigures The Oregon Trail and Beth Dies of Dysentery Published on:
May 27, 2020

In 2018, The Strong embarked on a project to digitize floppy disks using a device called the Kryoflux to capture the data stored on 3.5- and 5.25-inch floppy disks. Reading a floppy disk in the 21st century was the first step necessary to preserve hundreds of floppy disks in The Strong’s archival collections. In some cases, the Kryoflux was a useful tool to capture old games and development materials but, with more than 1,500 floppy disk images in […]

Continue Reading about Digging for GEM icons in an Atari ST Floppy Disk Published on:
April 28, 2020

Digital Games Curator Andrew Borman uncovers the history of Atari’s Gremlins The Arcade Game, from its initial conception in 1983 to its cancellation in 1985. 

Continue Reading about Game Saves: Unreleased Gremlins The Arcade Game by Atari Published on:
February 12, 2020

Ian Larson, 2019 Strong Research Fellow
PhD Student, University of California, Irvine; Irvine, California
Any new popular device is bound to have its share of imitators and copycats. This certainly was the case in 1972 after Ralph H. Baer and Magnavox released the first-ever home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. While Baer’s Odyssey failed to spark a revolution, one of its many games, Table Tennis, would become the inspiration for the game that did: Nolan Bushnell and Atari’s PONG, the first […]

Continue Reading about Clones in the Archives: Console and Software Cloning Practices in the Early Years of Video Games Published on:
January 23, 2020

Is pinball a game of skill or a game of chance? Most people today would argue it’s a game of skill. The player chooses when to hit the ball with their flippers and some can even aim with deadeye precision at the glitzy little light-up targets that make these games so iconic. But what if we stripped that all away? No lights, no million-point multipliers, and most importantly, no flippers. Is still a game of skill when all you’re armed […]

Continue Reading about Taking the Plunge: Two Pivotal Games that Set the Course of Pinball’s History Published on:
December 20, 2019

Playing in the Past
Robert Whitaker
2019 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow
Research Fellow, The Waggonner Center, Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, LA
To study the early history of digital games is to study games with historical settings. Whether the game was designed for educational use like MECC’s The Oregon Trail, or commercial profit like SSI’s Computer Bismarck, history games are an essential part of the early history of digital games as a medium.

For the past six years I’ve been studying the relationship […]

Continue Reading about Playing in the Past Published on:
December 9, 2019

In the beginning (or at least in the late 19th century), there was film. Capturing moving images and playing them back for astonished audiences at the cinema more than a century ago was magical. Though many people are still familiar with film, which has endured as a medium despite changing technologies, there are plenty of moving image formats which have been rendered obsolete over time and have found their way into the holdings of numerous libraries, archives, and museums.

I previously […]

Continue Reading about What’s Up with U-Matic? Published on:
November 22, 2019