Games Archive

As part of an ongoing museum project, I am digging into archives to locate the history of Rochester at Play. As someone relatively new to New York and Rochester—where The Strong calls home—I am connecting more deeply to the city as I learn how and where people played historically. Rochester locals graciously share stories about sledding hills and the old play spaces unfortunately swallowed up by construction. City historians and archivists steer me to resources that spotlight the fun tales […]

Continue Reading about Highlights of Rochester at Play: Bicycling, Basketball, and Bowling Published on:
January 27, 2023

Play begins in anticipation. This is true not only for play generally but also specifically for video games. We discover a game from an advertisement or through word of mouth or perhaps from reading or watching something that someone else—often a professional journalist—has written or produced about the game. We begin to daydream about the game and think about what we’ll do in it, what surprises we’ll discover, and what challenges we will have to overcome. Our fingers itch to […]

Continue Reading about David Ahl: Getting Creative with Computers Published on:
January 20, 2023

The Toy and Game Industry in the U.S.
The U.S. toy industry, for obvious reasons, doesn’t have hundreds of years of history extending before the industrial revolution that Europe experienced. Before the early 1800s, if you were a child of wealthy parents, you likely had toys purchased from overseas for you or perhaps purchased in one of the new-fangled “department stores” in a major city. If you weren’t so fortunate, the few toys and games you most likely had were “folk […]

Continue Reading about A Brief Jewish History of the Toy and Game Industry: The United States Published on:
December 22, 2022

Many people know how much impact Jews and Jewish culture have had on entertainment industries like film, television, and comic books. But Jewish designers, entrepreneurs, and inventors have also shaped the world of toys, games, pinball, and video games, and the products of their careers are a huge part of the collections of both The Strong museum and the childhoods of millions in the U.S. and around the world. Those careers go back to the early days of the industrial […]

Continue Reading about A Brief Jewish History of the Toy and Game Industry: Nuremberg, Germany Published on:
December 16, 2022

In October 2021, The Strong launched The Sid Sackson Portal, a project funded by the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Record Commission, which holds pride of place here in the archives.. On the site, you can view full PDFs of each year’s diary or Browse the Collection to keyword search or to view individual page image files. You can also learn more about Sid and his career, view hundreds of photos of game prototypes (as well as published games), […]

Continue Reading about The Sid Sackson Portal: One Year Later Published on:
December 2, 2022

This week we’re celebrating our annual Women in Games event that spotlights women who have shaped the video game industry, and so it seems fitting to post a blog honoring Margot Comstock, a publishing visionary who helped people become familiar and fall in love with computers and computer games. Sadly, Margot passed away on October 22, 2022.
When Margot Comstock began her work in the 1970s, personal computing was just taking root. Computers, as they first developed after World War II, […]

Continue Reading about Margot Comstock, Publishing Pioneer Published on:
November 14, 2022

Your hands are shaking as you fumble with the small, plastic pieces, eyes scanning the red board for the hole that matches the shape clutched in your fingers…
The tick-tick-tick of the timer is drowned out by the pounding of your heart in your ears…
You know it’s coming but cannot stop yourself from jumping when the timer stops ticking and BOOM! The game board pops up, launching all the pieces into the air and onto the floor around you.
You breathe a […]

Continue Reading about Playing to Conquer Fears and Tame Anxiety Published on:
November 4, 2022

One Prototype to rule them all, One Prototype to backup and save.
Long before Peter Jackson brought The Lord of the Rings to life on the big screen, others tried their hands at adapting the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy classic. With the 1978 animated film directed by Ralph Bakshi just a few years prior, Parker Brothers began advertising a video game adaptation in 1982.
Scheduled for a winter 1983 release, The Lord of the Rings: Journey to Rivendell for Atari 2600 home consoles […]

Continue Reading about Game Saves: The Lord of the Rings Atari 2600 Published on:
September 30, 2022

I was a math kid, one who enjoyed solving simple problems of multiplication and division, arithmetic and subtraction. For many years my favorite toy was DataMan, a calculator themed as a space hero that was created in the late 1970s by Texas Instruments, the same company that introduced not only the portable calculator but also such electronic toys as the Little Professor and Speak n Spell. Still, none of these simple calculations captured my fancy the way prime numbers did.
I […]

Continue Reading about Playing with Primes Published on:
September 2, 2022