A Moment With…
Paul Drury visits this amazing place and meets assistant vice president Jeremy K Saucier
Jeremy K Saucier chats about this awesome gaming museum
Located in Rochester, New York, The Strong – named after its founder Margaret Woodbury Strong – is America’s National Museum Of Play. Opened to the public in 1982, it boasts a superlative collection of toys and games spanning centuries and includes the World Video Game Hall Of Fame And International Center For The History Of Electronic Games which, at present, preserves more than 60,000 videogame-related items.
Why is ‘play’ something worth creating a museum around?
It’s immensely important. It plays a huge role not only in our history, but also in human development. Though it’s often associated with childhood, we play throughout our lives. We all have our fascinations, our ‘play’, whether that’s gardening or videogames.
How do videogames fit in to your museum?
Our mission is to preserve the history of play, and videogames have changed the way we play in fundamental ways. They’ve also changed the ways we communicate with each other, relate to each other and even how we learn. Historians study film and literature and we believed that in the 21st century, the dominant cultural form was going to be videogames and scholars would study these as well. We wanted to build a collection that would preserve and interpret that history.
So how have you gone about that goal?
Firstly, by collecting the games themselves. We have more than 60,000 games and related peripherals and hardware, plus there’s all the hard work of preserving things on magnetic media and storing the original source code. Then we have the one-of-a-kind archival material, like Will Wright’s notebooks, Roberta Williams’ design documents and the original Williams’ pinball playfield drawings, including many from the Forties done by Harry Williams himself. You can actually see the erasure marks, where he updated his designs! Those give us an insight into how designers created games. We also have a collection of over 20,000 computer and videogaming magazines and they help us understand gaming culture. We have every issue of Retro Gamer, too, and your magazine plays an important role in that history. We’ve had researchers come here and use them!
We’re glad to help! What are some of your must-see exhibits?
We have many iconic objects, like Ed Logg’s prototype Asteroids cabinet. We have the personal design documents of people like Dani Bunten Berry and the Apple II computers owned by Bill Budge and John Romero. Ralph Baer was an incredible supporter of our collection and he donated all his design notes for Simon, plus we have on display a recreation of his Brown Box and the actual desk from his Florida workshop, complete with his cardigan and slippers!
Tell us a little about the museum’s archives.
We have hundreds of thousands of documents and company records, paper and digital, including Atari corporate records, which came to us on 23 pallets! It took over a year just to organise that and it includes original engineering drawings, internal correspondence, design binders for games like Star Wars and Missile Command… and we have similar material for companies like Sierra, Brøderbund, Adventure International and many more.
We have many iconic objects, like Ed Logg’s Asteroids cabinet Jerry Ellis
Any future plans you can share?
We’ve recently started a ‘Women in Games’ initiative. Because of the nature of our collection, we can look back and say, ‘Hey, women have been part of the games industry since the very beginning’. We want to look at their roles as game designers, as executives, as workers on the factory floors, as game players… and how women have been represented in games, too.
For more information and to plan your visit see museumofplay.org