Those of us with large data storage needs today are spoiled, with hard drives totaling over 20 terabytes, and options like remote cloud storage offer virtually unlimited storage, if you are willing to pay. Step back to 1998, and things were quite different. According to one source, a 12-gigabyte hard drive cost $349 (the equivalent of more than $650 in 2024).
While 12 gigabytes of storage was large for the time, hard drives were not the only solution for data storage. […]
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Contact Moments with Japanese Game Magazines at The Strong Museum
On a snowy winter day in January 2024 at The Strong National Museum of Play, I read about the far-off land of Hyrule, inhabited by fiery dragons, rock-monster-people, and evil twin-sister witches. I pored over issues of Weekly Famitsu, the most popular Japanese gaming magazine, looking at their coverage of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. On page 89 of issue no. 507, I see the heading 謎の少年の正体が明らかにされる? (roughly: “Will the identity of the mysterious boy be revealed?”), with […]
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Birth of the Modern Game Show
By Bob Boden, co-founder of the National Archives of Game Show History
On September 4, 1998, ITV network in the United Kingdom premiered a one-hour primetime game show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It featured one contestant, sitting across from host Chris Tarrant, answering up to 15 multiple choice general knowledge questions of increasing values, from £100 to a top prize of £1 million. As long as the player answered questions correctly, they could remain in the “hot […]
A Sight to Behold: Dungeons & Dragons’ Beholder Monster
In light of 2024 being the 50th anniversary of the famous tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, it felt right to investigate more iconic monsters from the game. A few months ago, I wrote about Tiamat, the dragon that stands over The Strong Museum’s Hasbro Game Park, so now it’s time to investigate another monster that has been around since the beginning of Dungeons & Dragons. Thankfully, I did not need to look far because right on the cover of […]
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Play in an Icelandic Saga
The forms of play are many and various. Take a look around a contemporary playground and you’ll see all sorts of play: physical, active play; imaginary play; conversational play amongst the children and adults; play with sticks, pinecones, wood chips, and other found objects; daydreaming; and the list might go on. What is true now has always been true in human history, and so when we look at almost any historical source we can find in there evidences of play […]
Gunfighter Gaming: A History of the Video Game Western Part I (1971 to 1979)
Game developer Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption (2010) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) introduced millions of people to an immersive digital world populated by Western gunfighters and outlaws. But these extraordinarily popular games are part of a longer history of video game Westerns that emerged in the 1970s, and drew on the mythic West portrayed in stories, films, television shows, and playthings. The evolution of the video game genre follows closely the development of the game industry itself from the […]
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Scrabble: A Television Hit?
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
Board games and television don’t seem like they would go together. It would be hard to imagine millions of viewers tuning in regularly to watch people play a game of Risk or Settlers of Cattan. But 40 years ago this month, viewers across the country had a six-year-long daily habit of watching people play Scrabble every day on NBC.
The Scrabble game show originated with Exposure Unlimited, a prize […]
Preserving Play: Beyond Toys
As a museum of play, one of the largest segments of The Strong’s collection is toys. Of our more than 300,000 museum objects (not including the additional 235,000 items in our library and archives), approximately 178,000 objects are either toys, games, miniatures, electronic games, or dolls. Play itself is an activity or experience, not an object, so when collecting around play, playthings are often the most directly related physical manifestation of play. That being said, not all play involves a […]
S-T-R-O-N-G: Investigating the History of the Ouija Board at The Strong Museum
The Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1890. Its development and success were closely tied to the rise of the American Spiritualist movement following the Civil War, but the men who patented and popularized the divination tool as a board game were not Spiritualists, but capitalists. At a time when the desire to contact the dead had coalesced into a religious movement, a group of entrepreneurs including Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond […]