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BlogNot 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Some tall tales are so pleasing that you wish they were true. Not the kind that are just mistakes, like believing that John F. Kennedy was a gifted ventriloquist or that Shania Twain is Mark Twain’s great grand-daughter. I’m talking about plausible old yarns like the one about the young George Washington fessing-up to cutting down the cherry tree. The story isn’t true, but generations of Americans thought it should have been because it fit our Founding Father’s virtues so […]
When the National Toy Hall of Fame inducts new toys each year, people notice—tens of millions notice. Clipping services send us news of the news. We find out that people are reading about inducted toys in Johannesburg, Tokyo, Moscow, Karachi, and New Delhi. And in Azerbaijan and Vanuatu. Two Irish news outlets fought over who would cover the story when the Stick was inducted into the Hall in 2008. CNN and the Today Show liked the Stick story too.
This year […]
Continue Reading about The Ball: Right Back at You, Jon Stewart
There’s something liberating about the yo-yo. I keep one on my desk for emergencies—like when a balky sentence has me hanging. You’d be surprised at how a twisted paragraph will straighten out and fly right after a few tosses of a yo-yo. In his superb novel, Stop Time, Frank Conroy wrote, “To yo-yo you have to let go.” And indeed you do; thinking too hard will tangle a yo-yo trick just as it can tie up an idea.
The strict parochial […]
Toy and game inventors deserve their time in the spotlight, according to the annual TAGIE (Toy and Game Inventors Expo) Awards. Bestselling books and hit songs earn authors and singers publicity as well as financial rewards. But create a million-selling toy or game and practically no one knows your name. The TAGIE Awards honor the people behind the playthings, celebrating their creations and the fun they’ve brought to our lives.
A few weeks ago, Nic Ricketts, the museum’s games curator, and […]
A recent e-mail inquiry from a researcher in Finland gave me a great opportunity to mine our vast trade catalog collection for information about the prehistory of electronic games. The researcher wanted to know more about the origins of pre-computer electric quiz games of the 1940s and 1950s.
Most books on the history of electronic games start the story in the 1960s, with Steve Russell’s creation of Spacewar! (1962). Others begin with Ralph Baer’s development of television-based video games. Some discuss […]
Continue Reading about Finnish Question Sends NCHEG Deep Into Archives
