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The CHEGheads have found and acquired a rare and unique Nintendo World Championships 1990 gray cartridge!
Collectors, in general, love that which is rare. Sports memorabilia aficionados covet the T206 Honus Wagner baseball card, comic book fanatics seek out Superman’s first appearance in Action Comics #1, and stamp collectors covet a chance to lay their eyes on an Inverted Jenny. Few collectors witness, much less acquire, such uncommon gems.
Those of us who prize electronic games have our treasured pieces as well. […]

Continue Reading about CHEGheads Find World Championship Cartridge Published on:
February 16, 2010

Is there a box of chocolates in your Valentine’s Day plans? If you’re going to give (or are expecting to receive) candy as a token of love, you’re part of a romantic tradition that began more than a century ago. In the 1890s, candy makers finally glommed onto Valentine’s Day as an occasion to promote their products, even though they’d already managed to integrate confectionery into other holidays, such as Christmas and Easter. Since that time, we’ve definitely taken their […]

Continue Reading about Sugar Buzz Your Sweetie Published on:
February 10, 2010

If one sign of a great game is staying power, then The Oregon Trail stands out for over forty years of enduring popularity. The game has also outlasted many different platforms.
If, like me, you played it growing up, you remember that the game challenges players to guide their wagon party across the great American West in 1848. To successfully traverse the continent, you must choose supplies, set your travel speed, cross rivers, trade with Native Americans, hunt for animals, survive […]

Continue Reading about Four Decades on the Oregon Trail Published on:
February 8, 2010

Happy Aquarium

Recently, I reluctantly signed up for Facebook.  The site’s grown too large for me to ignore it any longer—and Lord knows I have tried.  Part of the reason I joined is because Facebook has become a huge platform for the delivery of games.  Several people I know don’t consider themselves gamers, yet they play Facebook games on a regular basis, mostly to maintain their farms in Zynga’s FarmVille and aquariums in CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium.
These real-time simulation games’ immense popularity […]

Continue Reading about Welcome to Farmville–Please Have Your I.D. Ready Published on:
February 3, 2010

What does Valentine’s Day make you think of? Boxes of chocolates? Bouquets of roses? Pledges of undying love? Sure, those are all part of the most romantic holiday on the calendar. On the other hand, from the 1840s into the early twentieth century, Valentine’s Day was also THE occasion to send insulting and downright nasty cards to your circle of acquaintances.

Somehow those proper Victorians took the tradition of sending sweet, heartfelt Valentine cards and turned it on its head. […]

Continue Reading about Have a Horrid Valentine’s Day Published on:
February 2, 2010

My fellow CHEGhead Marc Check began his last blog talking about some of the great Pac-Man artifacts in the NCHEG collection and how this character evokes in him a sense of early 80’s nostalgia. Like Marc, I too, caught Pac-Man Fever when it struck in epidemic proportion in 1981. My heart still holds a special place for Pac-Man and his family. Yes, family. Such a global phenomenon was bound to inspire spin-offs, and in this case it included a wife […]

Continue Reading about I Have Pac-Man Fever Again Published on:
January 22, 2010

Strong National Museum of Play has many historical artifacts that help to tell the story of play in the wider context of American history. One of my favorite posters in the museum’s collection shows how baseball intersected with American history in the early twentieth century.
Baseball was widely recognized as America’s national sport by the late 1800s, and it continued to grow in popularity in the early twentieth century. Two separate major leagues were in place in 1901, and by 1903 […]

Continue Reading about Batter Up, Uncle Sam! Published on:
January 19, 2010

“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