Founded in 2010, the William A. Higinbotham Game Studies Collection, a special collection at Stony Brook University, contributes directly to the study of video games as popular culture and to their historical longevity.
The initiative is dedicated to: collecting and preserving the texts, ephemera, and artifacts that document the history and work of early game innovator and Brookhaven National Laboratory scientist William A. Higinbotham, who in 1958 invented the first interactive analog computer game, Tennis for Two; and documenting the material culture of electronic screen-based game media.
In addition to game hardware and software, game-related ephemera is collected, which consists of: video and computer game magazines; game catalogs; strategy guides; game boxes and cases; game instruction manuals; video and arcade game promotional materials; game memorabilia; photographs of arcades; and original publications on video game history and culture.
Read the article by curators Kristen J. Nyitray and Raiford Guins recently published in Metropolitan Archivist (volume 20, no. 2, Summer 2014, pp. 6-9).
Kristen Nyitray
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