“Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.”
~ Admiral James T. Kirk
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Morality at Play in Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead
As a kid, I loved playing hide-and-seek. My favorite variation was a team-based game in which a dozen of us hid and chased each other through the streets and backyards of my densely packed neighborhood. Because we all knew the best places to hide, no one could stay in the same spot for more than a few minutes. In such an environment, the game hinged on making difficult choices such as when to sacrifice one of our slower teammates for […]
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The World Video Game Hall of Fame
We are excited to announce that The Strong has launched the World Video Game Hall of Fame to recognize individual electronic games of all types (arcade, console, computer, handheld, and mobile) that have been popular over a sustained period and influenced the video game industry or popular culture in general.
From Pixel to Paper: The Centipede Board Game
In 1981, Atari released Centipede—a shoot ‘em up arcade game comprised of pixilated creepy-crawlies—created by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey, one of the first female game designers. To play the game, a player used a trackball controller and a single firing button to shoot at a large centipede as it wound its way down the screen and through a field of mushrooms. The player also needed to steer clear of spiders, fleas and scorpions. The game quickly became one of […]
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Never Alone: Protecting Cultural Heritage through Interactive Play
I recently listened to independent researcher Paul J. Hale’s Disney Story Origins podcast. In each episode, Hale seeks to understand the historical facts or origins of folklores, myths, and tales adapted by Disney for the big screen. Hale’s podcast presents amusing factoids and comparisons. In Disney’s Mulan, for example, the heroine has a token sidekick, Mushu, the fiery, feisty dragon. In Chinese folkore, Mulan does not have a sidekick. After her Uncle Mu Shu refuses to go to war, Mulan […]
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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 […]
Video Game Focus Groups as History
ICHEG collects a vast variety of archival materials such as artwork, design documents, and interoffice communication that provide researchers with essential details about how game companies and designers conceived, thought about, created, and sold their games.
The Virtual World of LEGOs
When Danish carpenter Ole Christiansen sensed a demand for inexpensive, quality playthings in the 1930s, he crafted wooden blocks and other toys and soon founded LEGO. In 1949, the company produced a set of red and white interlocking plastic bricks entitled “Automatic Building Blocks.” For decades, LEGO sets have provided children and adults with hours of creative play. In 1997, electronic game developer and publisher Mindscape introduced the construction toy to virtual play with LEGO Island.
Jordan Mechner Collection Documents Revolution in Game Graphics
A century ago, Max and Dave Fleischer, two brothers from Brooklyn, developed a device that allowed animators to capture live-action events frame by frame. They tested their system on the roof of Max’s apartment building, where Dave, wearing a black clown suit, cavorted in front of a white sheet. Max captured the movements on film and projected them onto a glass plate that he then used to trace out pictures of individual movements. The result was rotoscoping, an animation technique […]
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