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“You are a daring deep-sea diver holed up on Hardscrabble Island, a dying little seaport all but forgotten….” And so begins Infocom’s 1984 text-based adventure, Cutthroats, about a search for sunken treasure. Gamer Tim Nichols included a copy of Cutthroats in a large lot of computer games he recently donated to NCHEG, and the game exemplifies different types of materials that are extremely useful in our efforts to preserve the history of electronic games.
Cutthroats, like so many Infocom products, features […]

Continue Reading about A Gift of Scuba-Divers, Sunken Treasure, and Secret Ink Published on:
January 14, 2010

Sometimes powerful symbols sustain the longest lasting toys. Lincoln Logs, a favorite for nearly a century, is the best example. We long admired the pioneers for their hard work and ingenuity as they turned the trees of the new world’s forest into simple and sturdy log cabins. The inventor of Lincoln Logs, John Lloyd Wright (son of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright), designed the toy to resemble the log cabin because he knew how effectively it captured the American […]

Continue Reading about Lincoln Logs: A Name that Fits Published on:
January 7, 2010

Start with a top. It’s simple, cheap, fun, unbreakable, and memorable; its principles, too, serve as the basis for several other toys. Assembled from a sharpened peg with a wheel attached, you spin the top between a thumb and forefinger and then let it go. The spin creates angular momentum that increases the mass of the wheel, or cone in fancier versions. With forces directed outward at a tangent the top balances, magically it seems, on a point. As friction […]

Continue Reading about The Top: Start Here Published on:
January 4, 2010

This is a good question to which people give several answers. The first is historical: “Football evolved from rugby, so footballs are shaped much like rugby balls, though they are a bit pointier.” This answer is exasperating because it invites another question: “So exactly why are rugby balls shaped that way?” Still thinking historically, clever speculators reason that because rugby balls were once made from inflated pig bladders and because pig bladders are shaped, well, you know, like footballs, rugby […]

Continue Reading about Why Is a Football Football-Shaped? Published on:
December 31, 2009

Even though many homes already display bright lights or pine wreaths and most stores are stocked to the gills with Christmas merchandise, some folks can’t quite begin the holiday season until they see the latest Hess toy truck.
Every year since 1964, Hess Corporation, a gasoline and automotive products retailer, has offered a new and different toy truck or vehicle for the holiday season. People of every age admire the trucks for their (mostly) familiar green and white Hess colors, their […]

Continue Reading about The Toy That Starts the Holiday Season Published on:
December 29, 2009

Not every Hall of Fame toy comes from a store. Take the cardboard box, for instance. No company advertises it. Parents don’t line up for it during the holiday shopping season. No one sings its jingle. It costs nothing. Yet the cardboard box offers the imagination a feast. With crayons and tempera paint, you can turn the cardboard box into an ocean liner, a space ship, a dragster, a covered wagon, a submarine, or a castle.

The toy’s endorsers include such […]

Continue Reading about The Greatest Toy Never Sold Published on:
December 27, 2009

When I was twelve, I cared about only two things, and the bicycle wasn’t one of them. I lived for playing football and reading science fiction, especially that genre’s dark prophet, H.G. Wells. I imagined the future the way he did: filled with invading Martians, human evolution gone awry, world anarchy, nuclear chain-reaction, a sputtering, cooling sun, you name it. When Wells imagined the shape of things to come, he saw frightful scenarios. Disaster loomed.
 But Wells was also a dreamer […]

Continue Reading about What Goes Around, Comes Around Published on:
December 22, 2009

Barbie. Love her or not, you have to admit that she is important. Here are three reasons:
1) Even as the competition creeps up, she’s the essential doll. Nearly all American girls own one and the average girl will own between eight and ten before she ages out of doll play. (I know we had a house full.)
2) Barbie is an ageless favorite. She debuted in 1959, after Mattel executive Ruth Handler vacationed in Germany and brought back a naughty tobacco-shop […]

Continue Reading about Barbie, You’re Beautiful Published on:
December 20, 2009

Although the electronic games of my youth have since evolved into something different, one thing has remained the same: savvy marketers continue to cash in on the popularity of electronic games through non-electronic merchandise. In addition, Internet storefronts allow innovative individuals to create and market their own electronic game-related products. The breadth of available items (and the oddity of said items) has grown exponentially.
As a tween in the 1980s, I owned various Pac-Man themed objects. I had the Pac-Man bed sheets and […]

Continue Reading about Holiday Geek Gift List Published on:
December 18, 2009