Last Friday we visited the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. This is a new section of the museum devoted to video and electronic gaming. It opened last November and I first heard of it only a couple of weeks ago. The website promised a comprehensive collection and I was not to be disappointed.
There it is – the first ‘console game’. The brown box is one of the Odyssey prototypes invented by Ralph Baer in the late 1960s. This simple device started it all, and we were able to play it last Friday.
The collection is divided into a few sections, the most dramatic of which is the arcade:
These are all originals in their original cabinets with mostly original screens, controllers and circuitry. I spoke with an attendant and he told me many of them had such things as new power supplies or coin slot systems, but of the 25 or so games on display (from a collection of nearly 200) the emphasis was on those games that were as close as possible to how they were in the 1980s.
I’d played them all of course, aeons ago, and it was like stepping back in time being able to do so again (at the mere cost of $0.16 per game!). I was particularly amazed by the working Asteroids, Star Wars and Lunar Lander since all three use vector displays, which are notoriously prone to failure.
We spent quite a bit of time at the arcade burning through 30 tokens (1 per game), but it turns out the true star of this collection was not the old games, but was the simply astounding collection of game history on display in the many cases. Such as:
Bet you’ve never seen one of them before? What about this one:
Note how the games are built in-to the unit (which was released in 1972). Of course slightly more modern game systems were represented as well:
And not just consoles:
This was all well and good (very good actually). But the collection truly lives up to its mandate of electronic gaming (as opposed to TV or console gaming). Which means, well all sorts of electronic games. Think LCD, VFD and everything between. It was in viewing many of these objects that my mind was truly blown:
Note the original boxes for many of the items.
“If only”, did I think many times, “could that be mine.”
Many of the displays were themed (educational games, sports games, simulation games etc.) and in the role-playing game section (which spanned from the board game Dark Tower [which we own by the way] to World Of Warcraft) was this pair on display:
The most important books every written perhaps? 🙂
The articles on display were only a tiny fragment of the entire collection, but I was very impressed with the choices which ranged from obscure to common, from American to English to Japanese. As I told the attendant, up until last Friday I may have supposed my own personal collection was the only one in America to contain both a Wonder Swan and a Wonder Swan Color:
And it got more obscure than this. How about the FM Towns version of one of the Japanese-only Dungeon Master sequels? Yes, that was on display 🙂
Needless to say, this now-permanent exhibit is highly recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in the history of electronic gaming. I feel privileged that it is so close to my house, and given that the curators plan to improve both the content and size of the display I have no doubt I shall return one day to be amazed all over again.
Strong museum is also home to many other collections of toy and gaming-related material, many of which are on display. Here are a few random shots of some of what we saw:
Yes my friends, that is a collection of Star Trek themed Yo-Yo’s. They actually had many more on show, including much of the cast of Deep Space Nine…
The above is unquestionably the cutest Jack-in-the-Box in the history of human civilization. It even has the word Love written on it!
And this last shot…? It almost defies description, so I shall just label it with the proper name. The following shot depicts a squirrel whimsy.
