Blog

Every year in early January close to 200,000 people descend on Las Vegas to attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and I joined the throng this year. That may seem out of place at first glance—there are many other large-scale events that might seem more in line with a visit from a representative of The Strong museum.
For instance, there are toy industry conventions, such as Toy Fair in New York City or Spielwarenmesse, its European […]

Continue Reading about “Playing” at the Consumer Electronics Show Published on:
August 23, 2019

When’s the last time you thought about everyone’s favorite old-fashioned magnetic media storage device, the floppy disk? Has it been years? Decades? Or never? With our experience today backing up onto cloud storage, shared folders, and USB drives, people seem to have forgotten how difficult saving your digital files used to be. In the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong, our archival collections contain hundreds of floppy disks which hold game design documentation, graphics, text […]

Continue Reading about Floppy Disks in the 21st Century Published on:
August 9, 2019

In March 2019, we spent two days at The Strong conducting research related to Intellivision, a home video game system produced by Mattel Electronics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We have beenworking on this project off and on for almost five years and expect it to lead to a book tentatively titled Intelligent Visions. As our research progressed, it became increasingly apparent that we needed archival materials to round out our analysis of Intellivision and its significance. We […]

Continue Reading about Intellivision in the Archive Published on:
July 31, 2019

It is rare that I have a chance to sit and enjoy Bob Ross in the middle of the day on the local public television network. When it is possible to catch an entire episode, it is fascinating to see how quickly Bob Ross adds layers to create a landscape painting of mountains, forest, or a coastline with a lighthouse. His style is distinctly different from other contemporary popular landscape painters like Thomas Kinkade. Bob Ross captivates people […]

Continue Reading about Bob Ross and Happy Paintings Published on:
July 19, 2019

Ken Fedesna, former Executive Vice President and General Manager at video game developers and publishers Bally/Williams/Midway/Atari Games, has donated a collection that documents the history of Midway Games and showcases the company’s work on the TouchMaster line of multigame touchscreen video game units and projects related to connecting their coin-operated games through the internet. Fedesna joined Williams Electronics in 1977 and, over his 27 years with that company and Bally/Midway, he managed the development of countless pinball machines, […]

Continue Reading about Ken Fedesna Donation Documents Video Game Developer and Publisher Midway Games Published on:
July 12, 2019

In May I had the good fortune to spend two weeks as a research fellow at the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, which sits atop the too-tempting playground of The Strong National Museum of Play. My objective: to capture, using only my iPhone, every last page of Chris Kohler’s collection of 300+ fanzines. Note to future fellows: a two-minute stretch routine will help prevent back pain!
Now an editor at Kotaku and formerly of Wired, a teenage Kohler got […]

Continue Reading about Paper, Please: What I’ve Learned (So Far) from Three Decades of Video Game Fanzines Published on:
June 28, 2019

The histories of tabletop games and video games are deeply woven together. Analog and digital games often share similar mechanics (such as experience points) or similar settings (e.g. dungeon crawling). Many times in the past, game makers have ported titles from one medium to the other. And yet perhaps the most crucial connection between analog and video games lies in the personal biographies of many game designers, who often began work with board games before applying their skills to the […]

Continue Reading about Paul Reiche III Papers at The Strong Published on:
June 20, 2019

 

Continue Reading about Game Saves: Fallout Extreme Published on:
June 10, 2019

In Part I of my skateboarding blog series, I discussed how the first big wave of skateboarding took place from 1959 to 1965, and then skateboarding went mainly “underground” from about 1966 to 1972. Part II told about how the introduction of Frank Nasworthy’s durable composite “Cadillac Wheels” enhanced the skateboarding experience, leading to the second big wave of skateboarding between 1973 to 1981. The third wave of skateboarding extended from 1983 to 1991 when famous skaters Tony Hawk (vert […]

Continue Reading about Sidewalk Surfing: The Gnarly History of Skateboarding Part III (1994 to 2019) Published on:
May 31, 2019