Toys Archive

Crayola Crayons were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame way back in 1998, the first year of the Toy Hall’s existence. So it was well deserved when coloring books entered the National Toy Hall of Fame as part of the class of 2019. Coloring books have been around for more than a century and they mark a special time in childhood when one of the simplest toys can offer hours of entertainment and satisfaction. It turns […]

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January 17, 2020

A board game begins with the board. But how is that board divided up? Often the simplest unit of division is a square. Consider the 64 squares of a chess board, or the 92 squares on a Stratego board. In each case, players take control of a square which exists in relation to other spaces around it, especially if they share adjoining borders. The design of these game boards affords or encourages certain types of movement, usually horizontally […]

Continue Reading about Hex Marks the Spot Published on:
December 13, 2019

Parents understand the importance of having a trick up their sleeves to distract and entertain within a moment’s notice. When I had to bring my toddler to a solemn family affair, I knew just what to slip into my pocket—a Matchbox car. It didn’t require power, it was quiet, and it was inexpensive. On November 7, 2019, Matchbox cars rolled into their place of honor in The Strong’s National Toy Hall of Fame.

It all began in a bombed-out pub, The […]

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November 15, 2019

Alec S. Hurley, 2018 Strong Research Fellow
PhD Student, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

 
 
Despite growing up in Rochester and routinely passing The Strong museum en route to the family business on Oregon Street, I failed to take advantage of the museum’s wonderful exhibits and its abundant collections until late June of 2018. Then, over the course of five days leading up to the July 4th holiday, I was fortunate enough to take a break from my doctoral studies at the […]

Continue Reading about My Week with Brian: A Conversation with the Collected Works of Brian Sutton-Smith Published on:
October 18, 2019

Just after Thanksgiving of 2018, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks at The Strong museum on a Valentine-Cosman fellowship. I wanted to know how board games mirror our understanding of ourselves, and how that understanding has changed over the last half-century or so.
I arrived on a chilly morning in Rochester to what the newscasters were calling “nuisance snow”—just enough to make driving annoying but not enough to shut anything down for these hardy Upstate New York folks—and was […]

Continue Reading about Out of the Kitchen: Board Games and Our Complicated Identities Published on:
September 13, 2019

 Birthdays. Love them or hate them, we all have one.

I realized the other day that I’ve surpassed the sixth month mark since my last birthday and can now see that next number creeping up on the horizon. As a kid, that half mark is pretty significant, as most like to tack on the appropriate fraction to their age for added clout. For instance, my nephew delights in telling people he is not just seven, he is seven and a half. […]

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September 6, 2019

Every year in early January close to 200,000 people descend on Las Vegas to attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and I joined the throng this year. That may seem out of place at first glance—there are many other large-scale events that might seem more in line with a visit from a representative of The Strong museum.
For instance, there are toy industry conventions, such as Toy Fair in New York City or Spielwarenmesse, its European […]

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August 23, 2019

When’s the last time you thought about everyone’s favorite old-fashioned magnetic media storage device, the floppy disk? Has it been years? Decades? Or never? With our experience today backing up onto cloud storage, shared folders, and USB drives, people seem to have forgotten how difficult saving your digital files used to be. In the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong, our archival collections contain hundreds of floppy disks which hold game design documentation, graphics, text […]

Continue Reading about Floppy Disks in the 21st Century Published on:
August 9, 2019

In March 2019, we spent two days at The Strong conducting research related to Intellivision, a home video game system produced by Mattel Electronics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We have beenworking on this project off and on for almost five years and expect it to lead to a book tentatively titled Intelligent Visions. As our research progressed, it became increasingly apparent that we needed archival materials to round out our analysis of Intellivision and its significance. We […]

Continue Reading about Intellivision in the Archive Published on:
July 31, 2019