Video Games Archive

A museum about play tends to attract employees who love to play, and that leads to office conversations about toys we’ve seen recently, how our new hobbies are going and, of course, what video games we’re playing. Recently, some colleagues and I were chatting about what we would be playing when we got home and I, realizing how I was about to sound, answered Two Point Museum. I could see in their eyes a lack of recognition and dug my […]

Continue Reading about Let’s Play Museum: Museums in Video Games Published on:
May 22, 2026

While licensed titles dominated the Game Boy Advance, some developers looked to create more ambitious titles for Nintendo’s handheld. Gatehouse Games, comprised of former members of Core Design, the studio responsible for Tomb Raider, hoped that “Spiralstone” would be the next big hit. While early prototypes were made, the game would ultimately never hit store shelves. Tom Scutt and Martin Gibbins, two of the three primary developers of the title, shared with me what went wrong, and what the plans […]

Continue Reading about Game Saves: Gatehouse Game’s “Spiralstone” for Game Boy Advance Published on:
May 14, 2026

By: Zari Smith, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
During the summer of 2025, I had the opportunity to visit The Strong National Museum of Play for a research fellowship. For two weeks, I had access to the collections and the rich archives that the museum owns in addition to the museum exhibits available for the general public.
I decided to apply for a fellowship from The Strong in order to find source materials that could assist me in writing my master’s thesis. My […]

Continue Reading about Exploring Japanese Games and their Paratexts Published on:
March 24, 2026

If you were to replace the original raster monitor on a vintage Pac-Man arcade game with a modern LCD display, would it still be the same game?
That’s the sort of choice we often must consider as we care for the hundreds of coin-operated games in our collection at The Strong, and while the answer is rarely straightforward, the process of thinking it through is instructive as to the larger question of how you preserve a video game, especially arcade games. 
A […]

Continue Reading about The Same Game, Twice Published on:
December 5, 2025

By Justin Schofield, Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow at The Strong National Museum of Play
Growing up, my brother and I played a computer game called Just Grandma and Me, a virtual book that reads to you and allows you to interact with the illustrations. I used to scramble off the bus to boot it up after school, and my brother and I listened to it together countless times.
At the time, I didn’t think of Just Grandma and Me as educational nor did […]

Continue Reading about Family Ties: A Short Story of Brøderbund Published on:
November 25, 2025

Rain hits against the windowpane, lending an almost rhythmic comfort as the gloomy grey sky refuses to give way to the sun. For some, this inclement atmosphere might lower their mood but, for others, these are their favorite kind of day—the type of weather that makes them want to put on a comfortable sweater, get a mug of tea, wrap up in a blanket, and sit down to play a cozy video game. When I say “cozy games,” that probably […]

Continue Reading about Finding Comfort in the Spooky: Cozy Horror Video Games Published on:
October 19, 2025

I arrived at The Strong National Museum of Play hoping to uncover more about the history of music in early video games—especially those released before 1985, the year the Nintendo Entertainment System launched in North America. I was particularly interested in games created by Atari in the 1970s and early ’80s. Many accounts of video game music history follow a familiar narrative: sound moves from silence to fully integrated musical scores, evolving in lockstep with technological advances. It’s an appealing […]

Continue Reading about Rethinking the Sound of Early Video Games Published on:
September 21, 2025

Opening the 1989 Sears Christmas catalog and perusing the fifteen-odd pages of video game advertisements, filled with pictures of boys and accented with blue, reveals what many women have felt for decades: games just aren’t made for us. Until the 1990s, video games were almost exclusively marketed to boys and men. Women, of course, can and did still play video games; but playing them meant wading through a swamp of sexist portrayals, if we were even lucky enough to encounter […]

Continue Reading about From Girl Talk to Girl Games: The Analog History of Games for Girls Published on:
August 23, 2025

The Commodore VIC-20 first debuted at the Computer Electronics Show held in June of 1980. It began to be sold for North American households the following year and from the get-go was a hit–an inexpensive computer that could display color graphics. The other major competitors of the time were the Atari 400, TRS-80, and Apple II. It’s easy to forget now, but in the early ’80s, Apple was still the newcomer, whereas Commodore—under the leadership of the aggressive and visionary […]

Continue Reading about A Brief History of the Commodore VIC-20 Published on:
August 2, 2025