ICHEG collects a vast variety of archival materials such as artwork, design documents, and interoffice communication that provide researchers with essential details about how game companies and designers conceived, thought about, created, and sold their games.

Continue Reading about Video Game Focus Groups as History Published on:
December 3, 2014

Frequently my two-year-old daughter Sidney greets me with two words: “chase, Daddy.” It’s a request that usually leads to lots of laughter and me circling around tables and chairs as I chase her throughout our house. In psychologist Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn, he notes that young mammals of nearly all species play chase games.

Continue Reading about The Lasting Appeal of Chase Games Published on:
September 11, 2014

Recently The Strong acquired a colossal collection of materials related to Atari’s coin-operated video game and pinball divisions.
The task of processing and preserving such a collection is multi-faceted, and in the coming months, The Strong’s curators, conservators, catalogers, and archivist will continue to evaluate, stabilize, conserve, and archive the collection. When archivist Julia Rossi and I inventoried a portion the collection, I was struck by the Atari coin-op game advertising mock-ups and proofs—materials used to draft, edit, and demonstrate how […]

Continue Reading about Inside the Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collection: What’s in an Ad? Published on:
July 7, 2014

Over the past two years, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) has been working to preserve pinball’s past by expanding its collection to more than 50 historic pinball machines—adding early “pin games” (flipperless predecessors to pinball machines) and electromechanical and “solid state” (electronic) pinball machines to the museum’s unparalleled collection of playthings.This summer (from May 24 to September 7), The Strong is showcasing some of these machines and related materials in Pinball Playfields, a temporary exhibit […]

Continue Reading about Pinball Lives at The Strong Published on:
May 23, 2014

ICHEG has acquired a massive collection of materials chronicling the history of Atari’s pioneering video arcade and pinball machine divisions from 1972 to 1999. The collection represents the largest and most comprehensive assemblage of archival records and other documentary items related to Atari’s coin-operated games anywhere in the world.
I first encountered Atari’s video arcade games at a local arcade where my brother and I spent many hours playing classic vector graphic space shooters like Asteroids (1979) and Star Wars (1983). […]

Continue Reading about ICHEG Preserves Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collection Published on:
April 22, 2014

Recently I had the pleasure of attending the 17th Annual D.I.C.E Awards at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Each year, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences celebrates the best interactive games and with its Pioneer Award honors a person whose “career-spanning work has helped shape and define the interactive entertainment industry.” This year the Academy added Eugene Jarvis to a distinguished list of previous honorees, including game designers such as David Crane (Pitfall!), Ed Logg […]

Continue Reading about Honoring Gaming Innovator Eugene Jarvis Published on:
February 20, 2014

Few of us think of the Fairchild Channel F (1976) when playing our new disc-based video game consoles. Fewer of us think of its creator, one of the first African American video game designers, Gerald “Jerry” Lawson (1940-2011). Nevertheless, the seeds for today’s systems were planted during the middle 1970s by Lawson and the team of engineers who created the first cartridge-based video game system. Although the more powerful and better marketed Atari 2600 (1977) quickly eclipsed Lawson’s creation, the […]

Continue Reading about Collection Documents the Career of Video Game Pioneer Jerry Lawson Published on:
December 2, 2013

Video game historians hoping to trace the intellectual and cultural influences of some games may find themselves crossing oceans to do so. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Japanese video games spread to North America and across the globe, exporting Japanese culture and energizing the slumping home console industry. ICHEG’s recent acquisition of a collection of nearly 7,000 Japanese video games helps preserve and document that history. As part of The Strong’s comprehensive collection of tens of thousands of other electronic, board, […]

Continue Reading about Wizardry, Dragon Quest, and the Japanese Role-Playing Video Game Published on:
November 7, 2013

Childhood trips to a local Kmart always meant two things: my mother searching for “blue light specials” and the chance to slip away to see and play new video games in an environment awash in electronic sights and sounds. What I didn’t realize then was that all those video game packages, aisles of shelves, elaborate displays, and flashy kiosks had been carefully designed and displayed to encourage me to purchase new games. Although I almost never bought anything, I engaged […]

Continue Reading about Video Games and the Wonders of Window Shopping Published on:
September 5, 2013