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Pioneering Chicago-based gaming company Williams Electronics Games, Inc. donated the Williams Pinball Playfield Design Collection, 1946–1995 to The Strong. The collection consists of more than 200 original drawings of playfields (the pinball machines’ surface where the ball rolls) layouts (with a nearly complete set of sketches from 1947 to 1971), hundreds of mechanical drawings of parts assemblies, and numerous examples of pinball concept artwork. Collectively, these one-of-a-kind materials document how Williams created their games and how playfield designs evolved […]

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October 13, 2015

Childhood is sometimes punctuated with brief but potent moments of blinding fear. Children often have imaginations that run amok and dark, isolated places are perceived as settings of unspeakable horrors that must be avoided at all costs. Kids can convince themselves (and some of us, even as adults, are still convinced) that horrible creatures await in the basement to snatch an unsuspecting victim; that vengeful ghosts haunt dark hallways; and hideous monsters hide under the bed, preparing to grab the […]

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October 12, 2015

What do you get when you take a grand Victorian mansion, all of its ornately detailed furnishings, wallpaper, wooden flooring, and inhabitants (including pets!), and shrink them down to 1/12 their natural size? Well, a dollhouse, of course!

Dollhouses were a passion for museum founder Margaret Woodbury Strong Strong, as they have been for people throughout the centuries, dating as far back as the 1500s. It is easy to understand the appeal of these tiny treasures. Anyone who has had the […]

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October 6, 2015

From my childhood, I seem to recall an early TV advertising ditty that ended with: “Lucky us in a Greyhound bus!” Growing up in a village too small for Greyhound service, my introduction to the transportation line came from ads in magazines, newspapers, and television and from glimpses of Greyhound buses in movies, songs, and popular culture. It took me several bus rides during college and a wonderful donation to The Strong to appreciate Greyhound and its place in Americans’ […]

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September 23, 2015

Paul Sams, former Chief Operating Officer at the American video game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment, has donated a collection that traces the history of the company and highlights the importance of its games. Sams worked for Blizzard from 1996 through 2015 and served as the Chief Operating Officer for eleven years. During his tenure, Sams accumulated more than 1,500 items representing the company’s many successful games and franchises such as Warcraft, World of Warcraft (an inaugural inductee into the […]

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September 1, 2015

What is it about light that makes it so appealing as an element of play? One of my recent blogs focused upon glow-in-the-dark toys that use phosphors and a form of light emission known as photoluminescence to provide a familiar greenish glow. I also described chemiluminescence, a form of light emission dependent upon a chemical reaction. Glow sticks, for example, use this form of illumination. However, Lite-Brite, a toy first produced by Hasbro in 1967, applied an entirely different approach […]

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August 31, 2015

In preparation for purchasing my daughter’s second birthday present, I polled my parent-friends to see what was the one toy their kids couldn’t live without. The answer was unanimous —a play kitchen—since it provides endless hours of play for a wide variety of age groups. In the back of my mind I thought, “I could just let her play in the real kitchen and give me a break from making dinner and doing dishes!” Of course that scenario presents a […]

Continue Reading about Work vs. Play: When a Chore is Not a Chore Published on:
August 19, 2015

The list of Academy Award nominees for 2015 included The Imitation Game, the highest-grossing independent film of the previous year. The film tells part of the life story, with plenty of artistic license, of England’s Alan Turing. Most famous for playing a key role on the top secret team that solved Nazi Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, Turing (1912–1954) was also recognized as a pioneering computer scientist, a mathematician, a logician, a philosopher, and a marathon runner. He […]

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August 12, 2015

Earlier this year, I joined The Strong to perform a truly exciting job: process the recently acquired Atari Coin-Op Division Collection. I loved Atari as a child, so I jumped at the chance to work firsthand on its records. My first exposure to video games, like many others born in the early 1980s, came through classic Atari games such as Pole Position, Asteroids, and Super Breakout. I was too young to experience these titles at the local arcade, but I […]

Continue Reading about Star Wars and Atari: Documentation of a Classic Arcade Game Published on:
July 28, 2015