Walk through The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, and it can be easy to see the building first as a place for playing. Children race between interactive exhibits, visitors stand before oversized games, and familiar characters from decades of popular culture appear throughout the museum. Yet behind the playable exhibits is something quieter and, for the history of video games, arguably even more important.
In storage rooms and archival boxes, The Strong preserves the evidence from which video game history can be reconstructed. There are original games and consoles, prototype hardware, source code, corporate memoranda, design documents, advertisements, sketches, correspondence, photographs, oral histories, marketing studies, technical drawings, unreleased games, and the personal papers of people who helped create the industry. Its International Center for the History of Electronic Games now cares for more than 60,000 artifacts and hundreds of thousands of archival materials relating to electronic games.
The museum did not begin as a video game institution, however. Its path from one Rochester woman’s enormous personal collection to one of the most important repositories for video game history stretches back decades before Pong, the Atari 2600, or the Nintendo Entertainment System existed.
Margaret Woodbury Strong and a Museum of Fascination
The story begins with Margaret Woodbury Strong, born in Rochester on March 20, 1897. Collecting surrounded her from childhood. Her father collected coins and assembled scrapbooks, her mother collected Japanese decorative objects, and an aunt collected bookplates. Margaret traveled extensively with her parents and later remembered being allowed to carry a small bag for dolls, toys, and objects she acquired along the way.
That childhood interest became something far larger in adulthood. By the 1960s, Strong had accumulated more than 27,000 dolls along with toys and tens of thousands of other objects divided among dozens of collecting categories. She added gallery-like wings to her large Rochester-area home and began imagining a museum where the public could see what she had gathered.
In 1968, the New York State Board of Regents granted a provisional charter for what she called the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum of Fascination. The name reflected the reaction she hoped the collections would inspire. Strong died the following year, leaving her collections and much of her financial estate for the creation of the museum she had envisioned.
It took thirteen years of cataloging, planning, construction, and institutional development before the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum opened to the public in downtown Rochester in October 1982. Its mission at first was much broader than play. The institution used Strong’s collections and additional acquisitions to examine industrialization, changing technologies, everyday life, the growth of the American middle class, and other aspects of social history.
The museum that eventually became synonymous with toys and games had not yet decided that play would define its future.
Finding the Museum’s Purpose in Play
During the 1990s, the museum increasingly developed programming aimed at families. Attendance grew, and in 1997 a new glass atrium opened with an operating 1918 carousel and a 1950s diner. In 2002, the museum acquired the National Toy Hall of Fame, adding another nationally recognized institution centered specifically on the history and culture of play.
A more decisive change came in 2003. After years of research and institutional planning, the museum narrowed its mission around the strongest part of Margaret Strong’s original collections: dolls, toys, games, and other artifacts connected with play. Major construction between 2004 and 2006 nearly doubled the museum’s footprint to approximately 285,000 square feet, and its identity shifted toward what became the Strong National Museum of Play.
That change opened the door to a category of play that Margaret Strong could scarcely have imagined when she began collecting dolls and miniature objects decades earlier.
Video games had become one of the dominant forms of play in modern life.
If the museum intended to explain how people played, then electronic games could not be treated as a side subject.
The Strong Begins Collecting Video Game History
In 2006, The Strong began a deliberate initiative to collect, preserve, study, and interpret video games and their history. Jon-Paul C. Dyson, a cultural historian who had joined the museum in 1998, became a central figure in developing the program.
The museum approached electronic games differently from an institution concerned only with computer technology or visual art. The Strong placed video games within a much longer history of play. Chess, cards, sports, tabletop games, dolls, model railroads, playground games, pinball, arcades, computer games, and console games could be studied as related parts of the human impulse to play.
The connection could be seen throughout video game history. Early computer programs simulated chess, checkers, tic-tac-toe, and sports. Ralph Baer’s experiments that eventually led to the Magnavox Odyssey drew upon familiar ball-and-paddle play. Digital role-playing games inherited ideas from tabletop role-playing games. Strategy games borrowed from board games and military simulations. Even modern multiplayer video games could reproduce activities as old as capture the flag.
Rather than separating electronic play from what came before it, The Strong developed an interpretive framework that moved between the game itself, the people and companies responsible for creating it, the players who experienced it, and the larger culture surrounding it.
The initiative that began in 2006 eventually became the International Center for the History of Electronic Games. The Strong formally launched ICHEG in 2009, establishing a permanent program devoted to collecting and studying arcade games, console games, computer games, handheld electronic games, and the vast documentary record surrounding them.
Preserving More Than the Games
A video game museum could simply collect finished games and the machines needed to play them. The Strong went much further.
Its collections attempt to document how games were conceived, designed, programmed, manufactured, marketed, sold, discussed, and played. That distinction is important because a finished cartridge or arcade cabinet cannot by itself explain the decisions that produced it.
Few collections demonstrate that better than the Atari Coin-Op Division Corporate Records. The archive contains approximately 600 linear feet of material dating from 1969 through 2002. Among the records are game development documents, cabinet artwork, assembly drawings, schematics, source code, technical records, company memoranda, patents, market research, focus-group material, photographs, advertising proofs, promotional films, and production files.
Some of the material records games familiar to millions of people, including Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, Missile Command, Star Wars, and Gauntlet. Other records document ideas that never became famous or, in some cases, never reached players at all. Instead of presenting Atari only through memories written decades later, the collection allows researchers to examine evidence created while games were actually being designed and sold.
The result is closer to preserving an industrial archive than assembling a collection of vintage games.
Ralph Baer, Jerry Lawson, Carol Shaw, and the People Behind the Screen
The Strong has also built extensive collections around individual creators whose careers reveal different parts of the industry.
The Ralph H. Baer papers preserve correspondence, drawings, designs, schematics, manuals, photographs, electronic components, and Baer’s own documentation of his work. Material relating to his early television game experiments includes his account of the development that eventually resulted in the Magnavox Odyssey, the pioneering home video game system released in 1972.
The Gerald A. “Jerry” Lawson papers document another major step in console history. Lawson played a central engineering role in the Fairchild Channel F, one of the first home video game systems designed around interchangeable ROM cartridges. The collection includes Channel F documentation, cartridge specifications, schematics, manuals, prototype material, and court records containing Lawson’s later testimony about Fairchild technology. The Strong also preserves prototype Channel F circuit boards, consoles owned by Lawson, and prototype cartridges.
Carol Shaw’s papers preserve a different side of early game development. Shaw was one of the earliest professional women working as a video game programmer and designer, first at Atari and later at Activision. Her collection contains design documentation, sketches, notes, advertisements, and source-code printouts, including code connected with Polo and her celebrated 1982 Atari 2600 game River Raid. Those records allow researchers to study not simply the finished game but Shaw’s programming and design process.
The Jordan Mechner papers extend that approach into computer game history. Mechner, creator of Karateka and Prince of Persia, preserved design and production materials, correspondence, artwork, digital files, film, business records, and other documentation. The collection contains 32 linear feet of physical records along with hundreds of gigabytes of digital material, giving researchers access to the working process behind games that helped define cinematic computer animation and action-adventure design.
Around those individual collections sit corporate archives and records connected with Brøderbund, Sierra On-Line, Her Interactive, MECC, Bally, Midway, Williams, and many others. Together they document an industry whose history might otherwise be reconstructed largely from surviving products and memories.
Finding a Super Mario Game That Never Was
Occasionally, preserving old files produces a discovery no one was expecting.
In 2021, cataloger Kirsten Feigel was processing donated material at The Strong when she encountered a floppy disk containing several programs. One turned out to be something extraordinary: a 1990 PC demonstration of Super Mario Bros. 3 created by id Software.
Before id became famous for games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, members of the team had developed technology that allowed smooth side-scrolling graphics on personal computers. They used it to create a demonstration intended to convince Nintendo that a Mario platform game could work on the PC.
Nintendo declined.
The project disappeared into video game history, and the developers moved on. Yet a copy survived on a floppy disk that eventually reached The Strong. Its discovery illustrated one of the great values of archival collecting. Historical importance is not always obvious when material first enters an institution. Something stored in an ordinary box can turn out to document a path the industry nearly followed but did not.
A finished commercial game tells historians what happened. A prototype can reveal what almost happened.
The Difficult Problem of Preserving Video Games
Collecting video games creates problems that museums devoted to paintings, furniture, or printed books do not face in quite the same way.
Hardware fails. Magnetic disks deteriorate. Batteries die. Computer operating systems change. Storage formats become obsolete. Online games lose their servers. Digital storefronts close. Copy protection can make old software difficult to run even when the original data survives.
There is another problem as well. A video game is not fully represented by its cartridge, disc, source code, cabinet, or packaging. It was designed to be played.
The Strong therefore developed several preservation approaches rather than relying upon a single method. Its work has included preserving original hardware and software, collecting magazines and other documentation, maintaining corporate and personal archives, migrating endangered digital data, and recording how games operate.
In 2011, ICHEG launched its Video Game Play Capture Project with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Museum staff and students from the Rochester Institute of Technology developed methods for capturing game play from original hardware. Thousands of games have since been tested and recorded.
Those recordings cannot replace the original experience, but they preserve evidence that screenshots alone cannot. They can show movement, sound, timing, control responses, level structure, animation, and the rhythm of actual play. For a game dependent on failing hardware or an obsolete platform, recorded game play may eventually become one of the best surviving records of what the game was like to experience.
The World Video Game Hall of Fame
By the 2010s, The Strong had become not only a repository for video game history but also a public interpreter of it.
In 2015, the museum established the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Instead of limiting recognition to commercial sales or technological novelty, the Hall considers games according to qualities including public recognition, longevity, international reach, and influence upon game design, entertainment, culture, or society.
Anyone can nominate a game. Finalists are reviewed with the help of an international advisory committee made up of people familiar with video games and their history. The result has turned the Hall into a yearly public discussion about which games deserve to be remembered and why.
The Hall of Fame also reflects a larger development in the way video games are treated historically. Games that were once dismissed as temporary entertainment are increasingly preserved alongside other cultural artifacts. Researchers can now study them through museum collections, archival documents, oral histories, scholarly journals, and the records of the businesses and people that made them.
The Strong has played a major role in that transition.
Bringing the Archive onto the Museum Floor
Most visitors will never enter the museum’s archival storage areas, where rows of arcade machines, prototypes, papers, and boxes preserve far more than can ever be displayed.
The challenge, then, is turning that enormous archive into a public story.
The Strong greatly expanded that effort in 2023 when it completed a $75 million project adding approximately 90,000 square feet to the museum. The project helped bring the institution to nearly 400,000 square feet and made it one of the largest history museums in the United States.
At the center of the addition is ESL Digital Worlds, including 24,000 square feet devoted to electronic games. Its High Score exhibit explores video games through art, story, business, technology, society, and play, while the accompanying Level Up area makes the actions and ideas found in games physically interactive.
Historical artifacts share space with playable experiences. Visitors can encounter Computer Space, the pioneering 1971 commercial arcade game, material relating to Home Pong, John Romero’s Apple II computer, and exhibits about creators such as Gerald Lawson and Nintendo hardware designer Masayuki Uemura. A 90-foot digital timeline places individual objects within the wider history of electronic games. The World Video Game Hall of Fame is now housed within the exhibit as well.
The design reflects the same philosophy that shaped The Strong’s collections. Video games are presented not only as machines but as combinations of technology, creativity, business, people, culture, and play.
An Archive Large Enough to Tell Different Histories
One advantage of a collection this large is that video game history does not have to be reduced to a procession of famous consoles and best-selling games.
The Strong’s Women in Games initiative, launched in 2017, has gathered records documenting women working throughout the industry. Collections connected with Carol Shaw, Roberta Williams, Her Interactive, and others provide evidence for a history that was often overlooked when popular accounts focused overwhelmingly on a small group of male programmers and corporate founders.
The Jerry Lawson papers similarly preserve material connected with one of the most important Black engineers in early video games. Corporate archives can document artists, technicians, marketers, producers, managers, testers, and executives whose names never appeared prominently on the box.
Oral histories add yet another layer. Memories must be treated carefully, particularly when interviews take place decades after an event, but recorded testimony can preserve experiences that do not survive in corporate paperwork. When combined with memoranda, source code, advertisements, contemporary magazines, prototypes, legal records, and finished games, those recollections can be compared against other evidence rather than accepted in isolation.
That ability to place different kinds of sources beside one another is what transforms a game collection into a historical research center.
Why The Strong Matters to Video Game History
The importance of The Strong is ultimately not that it owns thousands of old video games.
Many private collectors own rare games. Other museums preserve computers, technological inventions, digital art, or individual parts of gaming history. The distinguishing feature of The Strong is the breadth of evidence it attempts to preserve around the act of play itself.
A researcher examining Atari can move beyond an arcade cabinet to internal corporate records, marketing studies, artwork, development documentation, photographs, and source code. Someone studying the origins of home console gaming can consult Ralph Baer’s papers. A study of cartridge-based systems can turn to Gerald Lawson’s records. Carol Shaw’s source code can illuminate the work of an early woman programmer. Jordan Mechner’s papers can document how a computer game evolved from sketches and experiments into a finished commercial product.
The collections can also produce surprises, like an unreleased Mario demonstration sitting unnoticed on an aging floppy disk until a cataloger examined it decades later.
That may be the most important lesson of The Strong’s work. Video game history is still young enough that a remarkable amount of its original evidence survives, but it is also old enough for that evidence to disappear. Companies close. Developers die. Disks fail. Corporate files are discarded. Websites vanish. Servers shut down, and games that once depended upon them can become impossible to experience in their original form.
Preservation determines what future historians will be able to know.
What began with Margaret Woodbury Strong filling rooms with dolls, toys, miniatures, and objects that fascinated her has grown into something she could not have predicted. At One Manhattan Square in Rochester, the history of play now stretches from traditional toys and board games to arcade cabinets, floppy disks, development files, source code, and virtual worlds.
The Strong National Museum of Play does more than remember video games people once enjoyed. Through ICHEG, its archives, its preservation work, and its exhibits, it preserves evidence of how games were created, how they were played, and how they became one of the defining cultural forms of the modern age.
Sources & Further Reading
The Strong National Museum of Play. “About.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/about/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Margaret Woodbury Strong.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/about/margaret-woodbury-strong/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “International Center for the History of Electronic Games.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/collections/icheg/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “International Center for the History of Electronic Games Fact Sheet.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/about/press-room/international-center-for-the-history-of-electronic-games-fact-sheet/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/collections/brian-sutton-smith-library-archives-of-play/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Research Access.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/collections/research-access/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Video Game Play Capture Project.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/collections/icheg/video-game-play-capture-project/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Women in Games Initiative.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/collections/icheg/women-in-games-initiative/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “World Video Game Hall of Fame.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/exhibits/world-video-game-hall-of-fame/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “World Video Game Hall of Fame Fact Sheet.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/about/press-room/world-video-game-hall-of-fame-fact-sheet/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “ESL Digital Worlds: High Score.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/exhibit/esl-digital-worlds-high-score/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Video Game History Timeline.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/video-game-history-timeline/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Preserving Carol Shaw’s Trailblazing Video Game Career.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/preserving-carol-shaws-trailblazing-video-game-career/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “The Strong’s Comprehensive Collection Chronicles More than a Century of Coin-Operated Games.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/the-strongs-comprehensive-collection-chronicles-more-than-a-century-of-coin-operated-games/
New York Heritage Digital Collections. “Margaret Woodbury Strong Papers, 1897–1969.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://nyheritage.org/collections/margaret-woodbury-strong-papers-1897-1969
New York Heritage Digital Collections. “Atari Coin-Op Division Corporate Records, 1969–2002.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://nyheritage.org/collections/atari-coin-op-division-corporate-records-1969-2002
Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. “Atari Coin-Op Division Corporate Memos, 1974–1999.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://archives.museumofplay.org/repositories/3/archival_objects/20913
Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. “Ralph H. Baer Papers.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://archives.museumofplay.org/repositories/3/archival_objects/13330
Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. “Gerald A. ‘Jerry’ Lawson Papers.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://archives.museumofplay.org/
Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. “Carol Shaw Papers.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2022/01/Finding-Aid-to-the-Carol-Shaw-papers_013122.pdf
Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. “Jordan Mechner Papers.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://archives.museumofplay.org/repositories/3/archival_objects/12083
Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. “Ken Horowitz Collection of Electronic Gaming Oral Histories.” The Strong National Museum of Play. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://archives.museumofplay.org/repositories/3/archival_objects/52931
Dyson, Jon-Paul C. “Building a Video Game Collection: Lessons Learned from The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games.” International Public History 4, no. 1 (2021): 7–16. https://doi.org/10.1515/iph-2021-2019
Dyson, Jon-Paul C. “Preserving Game History at The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games.” Kinephanos (2014). https://ojs.kinephanos.ca/index.php/revue/en/article/view/135
“Collecting, Preserving, and Interpreting the History of Electronic Games: An Interview with Jon-Paul C. Dyson.” American Journal of Play 10, no. 1. https://www.museumofplay.org/journalofplay/issues/volume-10-number-1/
Barwick, Joanna, James Dearnley, and Adrienne Muir. “Playing Games with Cultural Heritage: A Comparative Case Study Analysis of the Current Status of Digital Game Preservation.” Games and Culture 6, no. 4 (2011): 373–390. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1555412010391092
World Video Game Hall of Fame. A History of Video Games in 64 Objects. New York: Dey Street Books, 2018. https://search.worldcat.org/title/1002831729
Moyer, Steve. “What Are Toys For? A Visit to the Strong Museum.” Humanities. National Endowment for the Humanities, December 22, 2022. https://www.neh.gov/article/strong-museum-explores-history-play
New York Heritage. “The Strong National Museum of Play.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://nyheritage.org/organizations/strong-national-museum-play
New York State Office of the Governor. “Governor Hochul Celebrates the Completion of The Strong National Museum of Play’s $75 Million Expansion Project in Downtown Rochester.” June 30, 2023. https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-celebrates-completion-strong-national-museum-plays-75-million-expansion
Mitchell, Billy. “The Super Mario That Never Was: Rare Demo Found at Strong Museum.” WXXI News, December 21, 2021. https://www.wxxinews.org/local-news/2021-12-21/the-super-mario-that-never-was-rare-demo-found-at-strong-museum
WXXI News. “Coolest Job in Rochester? It Might Be Exhibit Designer or Gigantic Toy Builder at the Museum of Play.” May 18, 2023. https://www.wxxinews.org/local-news/2023-05-18/strong-museum-play-expansion
Rochester Business Journal. “Swinney, Museum Innovator, Dies.” May 8, 2006. https://rbj.net/2006/05/08/swinney-museum-innovator-dies/
Rochester Business Journal. “Non-Profit Report: Strong National Museum of Play.” November 30, 2007. https://rbj.net/2007/11/30/non-profit-report-strong-national-museum-of-play/
Rochester Business Journal. “Strong Receives Grant for Developing Video Game Exhibits.” April 11, 2018. https://rbj.net/2018/04/11/strong-receives-grant-for-developing-video-game-exhibits/