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BlogRecently, as I competed in a group online challenge, a player presented me with the following puzzle:
Blank Picross Puzzle
I had no concept or instructions of how the puzzle worked, so I turned to my husband and asked if he had any idea. He exclaimed, “It’s Picross!”
Picross, short for picture crossword, is a Japanese logic puzzle game known also as a griddler or nonogram. Each puzzle contains a hidden picture revealed only after the player fills in squares based on […]
Following the blog I wrote recently on video game preservation in Europe, readers sent me emails about a couple of other museums there. One is at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, which currently has a temporary exhibit on the history of video games. The other is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow. Let us know about your experiences with these or any other video game museums.
Part of a recent conversation with a friend focused on his concerns about which video games his daughter is currently interested in. Are these the right games at her age? Do they contain violent material that isn’t implied by the title? Will she be able to get online through the game console and chat with people she doesn’t know? As both a curator and a parent of young children, I share his concerns and have given them a great deal […]
Veteran game designer Don Daglow recently gave the International Center for the History of Electronic Games a collection of design documents, early drafts of code, play test reports, and other papers that document the development of his games, including Neverwinter Nights (1991), one of the most important games in the history of the industry.
Daglow’s team had to overcome numerous technical hurdles to produce the game. Dial-up modems operated at speeds one-hundredth or one-thousandth of the rates of modems today. Game instructions […]
Continue Reading about Creating MMORPGs: The Neverwinter Nights Story
Space Invaders. Tetris. Mario Brothers. Sonic the Hedgehog. Final Fantasy VII. Halo.
Whether you’ve played these games or not, you recognize them as some of the most influential titles ever released. They are killer applications—the type that lead gamers to shell out big bucks for a brand new system just for the opportunity to play one game. A killer app can provide stability to a fledging game publisher for years or cause a new video game console to excel.
Space Invaders proved […]
As legendary game designers David Crane, Steven Cartright, and Garry Kitchen spoke at the recent Classic Gaming Expo, I couldn’t help but reminisce about some of my favorite Activision titles from the early 80s. As the first third-party developer in the video game industry, Activision released fascinating titles, such as Barnstorming, Keystone Kapers, and Kaboom!, for the Atari VCS. Crane’s classic platformer Pitfall! came to dominate my play experiences—both on the screen and off.
Pitfall image from GameFAQs
Our building efforts began […]
As a curator, I’m enthusiastic about every item I acquire for the museum’s collections, but certain acquisitions are definitely more newsworthy than others. I recently had the chance to appear on regional cable TV news, talking about the museum’s latest Monopoly set. The story involves Strong’s acquisition of this historic version of Monopoly—older even than the “tie-box Monopoly” the museum owns from 1933. The Heap Folk Art Monopoly, as it’s known, predates Monopoly “inventor” Charles Darrow’s published version by some […]
Continue Reading about The Story behind Strong’s Folk Art Monopoly Game
Recently, a couple of things have prompted me to think more about the history of video games in Europe. First, I’ve been reading Tristan Donovan’s excellent new book: Replay: The History of Video Games. One of the key contributions of the book is its attention to the often neglected history of European gaming, such as the importance of the Sinclair Spectrum for game development in Great Britain. Second, we at ICHEG have been in touch with a number of groups […]
The summer of 1979 will live on in my childhood memories. At the ripe old age of nine, my neighborhood pals and I were already masters of summer vacation fun. We made numerous trips to the community pool; played innumerable backyard games of tag, hide-and-seek, and red light, green light; and spent countless hours dashing through our lawn sprinklers. We took every opportunity to play outside, where we would remain from dawn until dusk. Mom would call us in when […]
