Nearly 600,000 guests come to The Strong annually, and many consider a visit to the arcade in eGameRevolution the highlight of their trip. Some visitors favor new games—slashing fruit on the giant touch-screen version of Fruit Ninja, munching opponents in the four-person Pac-Man Battle Royale, or playing the only Sega Giant Tetris game in North…
Recently, Minecraft fever struck my house. All four of my children now play the game and one Saturday morning my kids showed me the houses, sheep farms, mines, and other creations they built in the game using blocks they mined or harvested from stone, ore, wood, or other materials. The buildings were creative, beautiful, and…
Temple Run, an iPhone game, was recently the rage at my son’s school, so he downloaded it to my phone. It’s a basic survival game in which the player, an explorer, flees with the idol from a jungle temple. The game rewards quick decisions as the player tries to stay on the path and jump…
We do! Recently, news reports cited as wasteful spending a $113,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games to preserve video games. We disagree. We believe video games not only are the most dynamic, exciting, and innovative form of media today…
The more than 140 arcade cabinets ICHEG owns are key components of our tens of thousands of video games and related artifacts. Our arcade cabinets range from early pioneers like Computer Space and Pong to rare titles like a stand-up Discs of Tron and the only copy of Sega’s giant Tetris in North America. Still,…
One of my favorite games in ICHEG’s collection is Atari’s 1976 arcade classic Breakout, an elegant, one-player elaboration of Pong. Players move a paddle side-to-side to keep a bouncing ball in play long enough to knock down multicolored layers of bricks. A tone sounds each time a ball strikes a brick. The ball speeds up…
On September 4th, the video game industry lost a true pioneer. Bill Kunkel, founder of Electronic Games magazine and longtime video game journalist, passed away at the age of 61. Kunkel began his career writing comic books and covering the wrestling industry, but he made his greatest impact as a journalist chronicling, celebrating, and critiquing…
Home video games turn 45 this week. That’s right, on August 31, 1966, Ralph Baer originated the idea of playing a video game on a television. An electrical engineer and employee of defense contractor Sanders Associates, Inc., Ralph had toyed with the idea of using a television to play some sort of game before, but,…
The Entertainment Software Association just released their newest data on the current state of video game play in the United States. The document reports that sales of video game software and hardware topped $25 billion last year, the average age of a gamer is 37, and 29% of gamers are over the age of 50….
We CHEGheads and everyone else at ICHEG and The Strong are thrilled that we’ve received a grant from the Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) for $113,277! Here’s what the grant is for and why it is important. First, some background. IMLS is a Federal agency that supports, as the name implies, museums and…
