Start Menu

You can navigate through the collection themes and items using the arrows or the numbered tabs at the bottom of the page. 

1. Start Menu (current page)

2. Part I: What Is a Video Game and Who Is It for? 

3. Magnavox Odyssey 

4. Atari Super Pong and Sears Tele-Games Pong 

5. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man 

6. Intellivision  

7. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and Extra Terrestrials 

8. Part II: Nintendo Rises 

9. Nintendo Entertainment System and The Legend of Zelda 

10. Nintendo Power magazine 

11. Game Boy 

12. Tetris 

13. Part III: Sega and Sony: Controversy and Competition 

14. Sega Tower of Power 

15. Night Trap, Mortal Kombat, Street fighter II 

16. Doom and Bible Adventures 

17. PlayStation 2 and Tomb Raider 

18. Part IV: Gaming Everywhere 

19. Sega Dreamcast 

20. Microsoft Xbox and Halo 2 

21. Dragon’s Lair 

22. Grand Theft Auto III 

23. Part V: The Present and Future of Gaming for All 

24. Wii Remote and Wii Sports 

25. Portal 2 

26. Game Boy: The Box Art Collection 

27. Never Alone 

28. Quit Screen 

Part I: What Is A Video Game and Who Is It For?

The early days of video games were a period of invention and experimentation. Early creators focused on how to make TV entertainment more interactive and how to bring the arcade gaming craze into the home. These experimentations led to a new medium of play: video games. However, the first games and consoles created for the home were still informed by enduring ideas of play such as sports and tabletop games. This nascent industry grew quickly and somewhat chaotically, pushing the boundaries of what was possible to recreate on a TV screen while lacking established business models for continued success. When the video game market seemingly crashed in 1983 it was due in part to low-quality games oversaturating a market that had less than a decade to establish itself as an enduring form of entertainment. It seemed as if this moment of intense creation could be lost to the sands of time....quite literally, in a landfill in New Mexico.  

Magnavox Odyssey, 1972

First generation home video game console

The Magnavox Odyssey was originally developed as the Brown Box by Ralph Baer in 1966. Given the speed at which video game technology developed in recent decades, it is hard to say how different history would be if the first video game console did not languish for over five years before finally being released by Magnavox as the Odyssey in 1972. At the time “video games” did not yet exist, so the console was sold with a whole box of accessories for game play, from screen overlays to augment the three moving, blinking dots on the screen that comprised all gameplay, to boardgame parts like paper money and playing cards. The marketing emphasized children and families as the target users. 

Pictured here is the console, controllers, two cartridges, and accessories for the games Haunted House and Roulette. To get a sense of how the screen overlay works, you can see a play through of Haunted House here.

Atari Super Pong and Sears Tele-Games Pong, Atari 1975

First generation console with hard-wired games

Atari’s first home console version of their massive arcade success, Pong, offered just four games, all variations on the iconic table tennis simulator. You can see the switch to toggle between games in the centre of the console. Pong was the first commercially successful video game. Some of the early pay-to-play arcade machine versions became jammed and stopped working because they were so full of coins. After this success and the official founding of Atari as a company, the idea for a home version that could connect to the television soon followed. Nolan Bushnell of Atari contacted Sears department store after seeing a Magnavox Odyssey in their sales offerings, and reached an exclusive deal to manufacture and sell the console. 

Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, Midway 1982

Maze arcade game ported to consoles

Public gaming culture in arcades attracted a largely male single-player audience, but in 1980 Japanese game designer Toru Iwatani wondered if the space could be more like a movie theatre; an ideal venue for couples on dates, with games that might appeal to women as well. The somewhat absurd story of how this would inspire one of the most visually iconic games of all time follows: 

“When I imagined what women enjoy, the image of them eating cakes and desserts came to mind so I used ‘eating’ as a keyword. When I was doing research with this keyword I came across the image of a pizza with a slice taken out of it and had a eureka moment – I based the Pac-Man character design on that shape.”  

Two years after Pac-Man, his feminized counterpart was created in Ms. Pac-Man and would go on to be one of the most successful arcade games of all time. When Atari created its own home console that could play cartridge games beyond Pong, successful arcade games were among the top titles people wanted to play at home. The maze-design and pizza shape of the Pac-Man couple were a huge step up from the three rectangular shapes of Pong, but effectively leveraged relatively simple 8-bit graphics possible at the time.  

Intellivision and Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack, Mattell Electronics 1979

First generation console and strategy game

Many companies that manufacture electronics have tried to enter the video game market. While some consoles do not make it past a brief window of game releases for good reason, others, like Mattell’s Intellivision, were simply ahead of their time. The Intellivision was only on the market for 5 years beginning in 1979, but it was the starting point for technology that would be used for the next 20 years. It was the first console to have 16-bit rather than 8-bit graphics, meaning pixels could store more colours. The Intellivision also had a built-in GPU for graphics, allowing some information to store on the console itself rather than restricted to the storage capacity of a game cartridge. The games offered by Intellivision were also some of the first to anticipate adults as a target audience, with titles like Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack aiming to recreate a casino experience.

E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Atari 1982 and Extra Terrestrials, Skill Screen 1983 

Single-player adventure game

In 1983 the American video game market became oversaturated and crashed. The console market offered too much choice and exclusivity. Alongside the Intellivision, Atari’s VCS had already been followed by the Atari 5200, ColecoVision, and Magnavox’s Odyssey 2. Each console had their own library of games and Atari in particular struggled with third-party development leading to low-quality games and duplication of concepts. One example of this from the collection is Atari’s E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and a Canadian knock-off developed around the same time, Extra Terrestrials. 

E.T. was an officially licensed title for Atari from the film of the same name by Universal Pictures. With little time for development before commercial release in the Christmas 1982 season, production of the E.T. video game had a small window for quality testing and widespread marketing. The game was notoriously bad, and urban legend had it that excess copies ended up buried in a landfill in new Mexico after the crash...which in 2014, thanks to excavation by a documentary film crew, turned out to be true. 

Extra Terrestrials was released in 1983 by a small Canadian company called Skill Screen, and its developers were not even aware of Atari’s official E.T. game. They were simply trying to cash in on the popularity of the film with an adventure for a “similar but not identical character.” However, the market crashed before more than a couple hundred copies sold. Now considered one of the rarest Atari games ever made, Syd Bolton was lucky to have received a donation to his collection from one of the original developers, Peter Banting.

Part II: Nintendo Rises

The apparent death of the American video game industry did not quite signify the end for developers in other parts of the world, and even American game sales remained strong in other countries like Canada. In Japan, Nintendo’s first home console was released in 1983 as the Family Computer or Famicom. While many US retailers refused to stock video games in the aftermath of the crash, arcades continued to thrive and Nintendo saw great success with its games in this format, eventually risking the launch of the American version of the Famicom in 1985: The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. Near the end of the decade, they would revolutionize gaming yet again with the Game Boy, the best-selling hand-held console for the next 20 years. While Nintendo dominated the market, their success helped grow and firmly establish the industry. Nintendo's model would set the standard for third-party game development and lead to the creation of equally beloved competitor icons like Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog. 

Nintendo Entertainment System and The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo 1985

8-bit third generation home video game console and action adventure game

The launch of the NES in America not only introduced a new product but was also an attempt to revitalize the home video game market. Retailers and consumers had little confidence in a product that had huge variations in quality of game play even within a single console’s offerings, never mind across all platform offerings. Nintendo’s success came from a combination of solid technology, beloved Nintendo branded characters such as Mario, and strict approval control over third-party developers creating games for their consoles.  

Nintendo also developed and published its own titles, including The Legend of Zelda which released as a launch title with Nintendo’s new console. The non-linear adventure game was based on creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s memories of exploring the forests near his home as a child, and was an early attempt at creating the sense of a limitless world for players.  

Nintendo Power, 1988-2012

Video game news and strategy magazine

Nintendo Power had one of the longest production runs of any North American video game magazine, beginning in 1988 and ending in 2012. It began as a free newsletter called Nintendo Fun Club and spawned other console-specific periodicals like Sony’s PlayStation Magazine. Nintendo Power rewarded fan loyalty by including secrets, strategy, reviews, and previews, all particularly valuable in the pre-internet age when communities couldn’t share their experiences as widely. 

Game Boy, Nintendo 1989

8-bit fourth generation handheld game console

Handheld gaming was not new when the Game Boy was released in 1989. Atari released the Lynx the same year and Sega the Game Gear shortly after, but Nintendo’s offering won fans over with its strategy of keeping things simple. It built on existing technology from Nintendo’s Game & Watch, a handheld that featured a single game and a clock screen. The Game Boy also offered longer battery life and sold at a lower price than its competitors.

Tetris, Bullet Proof Software 1988

Puzzle game

The Game Boy was released in North America bundled with the game Tetris. The game was recently imported from the Soviet Union amid a bidding war for the incredibly fun and deceptively simple gameplay of shifting colourful shapes to complete rows of blocks. While American and Japanese titles dominated the market, games were being developed all over the world, including in the Soviet Union at the Academy of Sciences. Alexey Pajitnov’s job officially involved testing computer hardware but he made games on the side with access to a computer.Tetris was eventually released across several PC and console platforms by nearly a dozen companies who all believed they owned the licensing rights to the title. Eventually, Alexey retained the rights to his game and founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers, the entrepreneur who brought Tetris to Nintendo. The Game Boy version is one of the best-selling games of all time and Tetris has been ported to over 65 platforms making it the most ported video game. The cartridge here is for the Japanese version of the NES, the Famicom. You can see it has a Japanese language instruction manual and features caricatures of children in Soviet dress.  

Part III: Sega and Sony: Controversy and Competition

As Nintendo’s success rebuilt an extensive video game industry, emerging competitors needed an edge to differentiate themselves from the kid-friendly gaming giant. For Sega this meant embracing an explicitly edgy image. Many of Sega’s most popular games had themes of sex and violence that Nintendo strictly suppressed in games from third party developers. At the same time, CD technology allowed developers to use higher resolution graphics and even live-action cut scenes (full motion video or FMV), making the action much more real and immersive than was possible before. This combination led to a moral panic about the impacts of “playable movies” in which children, still perceived as the target audience for video games, were not only passively entertained by violence but encouraged to virtually act it out. When the United States Senate convened a series of hearings in 1993, the issue of violence also led to discussions of representation, racism, and sexism in games. While progress on the latter fronts was undeniably slow, the creation of a unified content rating system for video games emerged and enabled creators to develop more mature and complex content, demanding equally more complex technological development. By the end of the decade, Nintendo’s main competitor Sega was exiting the console market, with Sony and the emergence of another rival beginning to control the market.

Sega "Tower of Power"

Three home video game consoles: Genesis 1989, CD 1992, 32X 1994

Not an official title but named by fans, the "Tower of Power” consisted of a 16-bit Sega Genesis released in America in 1989, a Sega CD released in 1992, and the 32X, a 32-bit add-on or transitional console to the 32-bit era in 1994. Sega was able to explore and offer new technology, like CD-based graphics and 32-bit’s leap from 2D to 3D at a lower cost. The three systems locked together and enabled augmented game play for users. All of the games for the system were FMV or full motion video, with the CD being primarily used for its storage capacity and the 32X for its processing power, which resulted in larger sized and clearer video playback. Games like Night Trap, which simulated watching footage from close-circuit TVs in a house, were sold as playable movies.

Night Trap, Sega 1992, Mortal Kombat, Midway 1992, and Street Fighter II, Capcom 1992

Interactive movie and two fighting games

Fighting games like Street Fighter II and particularly Mortal Kombat, with its brutal finishing moves, were one of the main concerns of the 1993 United States Senate Hearings on Video Games, investigating whether players were at worst being taught and encouraged to enact violence, and at best becoming desensitized. As mentioned with the 32X, thanks to the video technology of CD games Night Trap was also on trial for its voyeuristic mix of violent vampires crashing a sexy sleepover. Ultimately, the hearings would lead to the creation of a regulatory body known as the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which like movies assign a letter grade based on the age appropriateness of mature content themes.

The hearings also raised questions about games that were racist and sexist. Today representation is a continued struggle in sex, gender, and race for video games, and in 1993 diversity in games was often limited to stereotypes, despite more Black and Brown characters being created. Street Fighter II featured the South Asian character Dhalism, who was portrayed as a yoga master, while at the same time female persons of colour were not introduced as playable characters until the introduction of Jade as a secret character in Mortal Kombat II.  

Doom, id Software 1993 and Bible Adventures, Wisdom Tree 1991

First person shooter, side scroller 

Doom was released on the second day of the 1993 United States Senate Hearings on Video Games. As such, it escaped judgement that day, but it was exactly the kind of entertainment being scrutinized. In Doom’s gameplay, you are on another planet being attacked by demons from hell and your task is to survive by killing all of them with an array of brutal weapons. The 3D visuals and action sequences were next level in the game industry, and built on the 3D graphics engine used to build id Software’s previous game, Wolfenstein 3D. This game had equally gory and dark themes, but the developers behind it had created a graphics engine that was fast and could render images with texture and pattern. Perhaps even more revolutionary was their idea to let other game developers buy a license to use the engine as the base for their own games.

This introduced a new model in the industry, one that allowed developers to choose to purchase the technological system and tools and focus instead on being creative. Christian game publisher Wisdom Tree was one of the first licensees of the id game engine, and used it to make their first game for the NES, Bible Adventures. The Senate would likely have approved of Bible Adeventures, but it is undeniable that its creation depended upon the software the hearings were trying to regulate and restrain. 

Playstation 2, Sony 2000 and Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Eidos 2007

Sixth generation home video game console and action-adventure game

Sony actually entered the video game market thanks to a failed collaboration with Nintendo. Sony created a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, much like the Sega CD for the Genesis. At the eleventh hour, Nintendo pulled out of the deal with concerns over Sony retaining the rights to any games created for the collaboration and their potential as a competitor. Nintendo was right to be wary, as this drove Sony to release their own console, the PlayStation, in 1994. It would be the first console to ship 100 million units, and Sony would succeed both Nintendo and Sega to lead the video game market by the end of the 1990s. Sony's follow up console, the PlayStation 2, has one of the largest runs of games with approximately 1.800 games released in North America, and a production of games spanning 12 years, even after the PS3 was released. The Syd Bolton Collection has a complete run of North American titles for PS2. 

Another example of the slow progress of representation in video games comes from Sony’s iconic Lara Croft. It took nearly 20 years in the video game industry for creators to imagine that an intelligent and athletic woman would hold any appeal as the default playable character in her own game. At the time, this was groundbreaking, but on the other hand, her creators have talked explicitly about the need to make her sexually attractive to appeal to a male audience. Nevertheless, she remains one of the most recognizable video game characters of all time and served as a catalyst for thinking beyond male protagonists in games. 

Part IV: Gaming Everywhere

In the years following the formation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board it became increasingly clear that children were just one of the audiences for video games. Young to middle-aged adults became a target demographic for games that offered more complex narratives and demanded increased skill and time to play. At the same time, the internet introduced the possibility of connecting players with each other, and consoles introduced online services using a broadband connection. In the early 2000s, Sega took a risk and developed an innovative new console, the Dreamcast, that revolutionized storytelling, internet connectivity, and portability. It was ultimately their last console, but its ideas were ahead of its time and would inform the next two decades of gameplay, including a quick successor, Microsoft’s Xbox. Online gaming and advances in development at this time also helped drive the creation of open-world games, providing players with a virtual “sandbox” to play in and explore, creating their own narrative through different actions and choices. Gamers now had freedom of choice within games and a wider variety of choices between platforms and genres.  

Sega Dreamcast, 1999

Sixth-generation video game console 

In year one of the PlayStation 2, Sega exited the console market and discontinued their final console, the Dreamcast, after just 18 months on the market. But like the Intellivision twenty years earlier, despite its short shelf life this innovative console would go on to inform gaming across other platforms for the next decade. The Dreamcast was hardwired for internet connectivity, introducing online gaming and including online voice chat on its service, SegaNet, years before XBox Live or the PlayStation Network. It also introduced the idea of downloadable content (DLC), with additional DLC available for the VMU or Video Memory Unit, a small, portable component of the controller with its own LCD screen that could play standalone mini games. The VMU seems to anticipate the second screen play of later consoles like Nintendo’s WiiU and Switch, and accessories like the fishing Reel & Rod motion controller is a precursor to the original Wii remote, simulating physical action shown on screen. 

Xbox and Halo 2, Microsoft 2001 & 2004

Sixth-generation home video game console and first-person shooter

The Xbox marked Microsoft’s entry into the video game market and the first console produced in America since Atari ended its run with the Jaguar in 1993. It featured a hard drive to store downloadable content and saved games, and an ethernet port to enable internet connectivity, significant when Microsoft would debut Xbox Live for online play a year after the console was first released. Halo: Combat Evolved was released as a launch game for the Xbox and helped drive the console’s popularity, with many reviewers praising the single player shooter as a reason alone to buy the console. Three years later, Halo 2's improved online multiplayer component would boast many features setting a standard in future games and online services, including matchmaking, lobbies, and clans.

Dragon's Lair, Digital Leisure

Interactive film

Unique to UTM’s collection is the largest run of Dragon’s Lair, a game featuring Western-style animation much like a Disney movie, and a decades long history of being ported across platforms that gives it the greatest number of releases in the world other than Tetris and Pac-Man. Syd Bolton was a huge fan of the arcade version as a child and eventually mastered and memorized the moves required for the elusive perfect score. He had about 50 releases of the game as well as associated materials in his personal collection in 2010 when he began researching for a book he would eventually publish, Collecting for Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. In addition to providing visuals and overviews of what makes each port unique, Bolton also explored the way that game history and information frequently becomes lost to time with each re-release and port of a game title. He saw the value in not only collecting and preserving multiple versions of games, but also chronicling history as a fan in a way that developers could or would not, and saw himself as the “unofficial archivist” of Dragon’s Lair. 

Grand Theft Auto III, Rockstar Games 2001

Open-world adventure game

Grand Theft Auto was always meant to offer a virtual world with freedom, possibility, and openness that gamers had not experienced before, but this was not fully achieved until 2001’s Grand Theft Auto III (GTA III). The 3D rendered Liberty City is a veritable playground of options, with skyscrapers and sunsets to see and a storyline that is not compulsory to explore. GTA III proved that open world games were not only possible but desirable, and while it faced little competition on the same scale, it did encourage other games to explore incorporating more freedom of choice in open world game environments. 

Part V: The Present and Future of Gaming for All

Every new form of entertainment brings a new moral panic. There was a time when both novels and movies raised concerns about bringing frivolous, brain-rotting distraction to the masses. Both mediums now enjoy established fields of study at postsecondary institutions all over the world, and Game Studies now joins those ranks. Game Studies celebrates the medium of video games and elevates it to a cultural text through which we can understand but also think critically about the movements it represents. Like interrogations of what texts should be canon on English Literature syllabi or popular discourse on awards in film like #OscarsSoWhite, Game Studies creates space to interrogate who gets to create and consume these media. More games are being made in the present and recent past with diverse creators, storylines, and production models that push towards making gaming a more welcoming space. At the same time, new forms of storytelling pose challenges to building a lasting game collection.

Wii Remote and Wii Sports, Nintendo 2006

Seventh-generation home video game console console and sports simulation game

As both Xbox and PlayStation looked towards new consoles that would support their libraries of games with advanced physics, graphics, and storytelling explicitly embraced by serious gamers, Nintendo took a blue-sky approach to target a broader demographic and remove limits on who could be a gamer, refocusing on casual, social play. The Wii design reimagined motion play and introduced simplified gameplay and a controller based on a remote, dubbed the "Wiimote," to re-centre family play and lower barriers to playing video games. The console was bundled with Wii Sports which used the Wii Remote in place of various sports accessories such as a golf club or bowling ball and had the player simulate the physical movements of those games. Advertisements featured people of all ages engaging with the console. Early criticism of this new direction implied Nintendo developed this at the expense of alienating hard core or serious gamers, but Wii still went on to become one of the bestselling consoles of all time and continues to inform Nintendo’s strategy today. 

Portal 2, Valve 2011

Puzzle-platform game 

The arrival of online game stores like Steam not only opened the player marketplace but also console storefronts for developers. Valve initially created Steam to sell their own games. Its much-anticipated sequel Half-Life 2 required players to download the online application and Steam storefront. Steam progressively added games from other makers and later, allowed independent developers to release games directly on the platform. This strategy effectively allowed creators to bypass the established industry practice of appealing to publisher's for distribution. Portal is an example of indie gaming concepts reaching the mainstream thanks to Valve. For their senior project, students at the Digi-Pen Institute created Narbacular Drop, a puzzle solving game with a unique portal feature, set in the world of Valve’s Half-Life 2. Valve took an interest in the game and brought all of the creators on staff, eventually leading to the development of the game Portal, released on Steam for PC. The immense success of the first would lead to Portal 2 being released on both computers and consoles, with cross-platform co-op play enabled between both.  

Game Boy: The Box Art Collection, Bitmap Books 2020

Reference book with colour illustrations

Bolton’s collection stops after 2018 when he passed away, but video game history continues, even as it becomes harder in some ways to add to the collection. The rise of mobile phone gaming, combining a phone that is also a super computer with downloadable video games, imitates Nintendo’s original product, the Game & Watch, a series of handhelds combining one game and a clock on an LCD display. This simple technology was also the basis for the Game Boy. When Satoshi Tjiri first created Pocket Monsters or Pokémon for the Game Boy, he was thinking about connectivity and sharing using the link feature, but also his own childhood collecting plants and bugs. He worried that modern children, even those playing the games he helped design, were cut off from the natural world, and wanted a game that would encourage them to connect with one another and experience the joy of exploration and searching for unusual creatures. It is lovely symmetry that almost two decades later, this vision has been fully realized in the AR mobile phone game Pokémon Go, as players catch pocket monsters in the real world outside. 

The image shows original box art for Pocket Monsters Midori (Pokémon Green in North America) and Pocket Monsters Pikachu (Pokémon Yellow) from the book Game Boy: The Box Art Collection. Alongside games, UTM is building a library of reference books on video game history, many with a highly visual approach. On the other hand, mobile games like Pokémon Go prove challenging to maintain in a library collection.

Never Alone, E-Line Media 2014

Puzzle-platform adventure/educational game

As we look past the collection of video game history that Bolton began and towards the future of both the collection at UTM and of video games as media, we are currently adding items to support curriculum and programming on our campus. One recent acquisition is Indigenous-produced adventure Never Alone. The game was made in partnership with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council and is based on the traditional Iñupiaq tale “Kunuuksaayuka,” whose tribal elders, story tellers, and community members share collectible cultural insights throughout the game in short video vignettes. The game is a tool for learning and reconciliation, featuring beautiful animation to entertain and educate players in a cultural history that is not historically dominant in video games or universities. 

Quit Screen

Syd Bolton spoke about associative memory and the way that people assign importance and value to the video games they connect with most. He also wanted his personal collection to be playable by anyone. He saw a history and future for games that was inclusive and welcoming, even though the culture surrounding the medium has not always made that a reality. This exhibit features many games made by men, white people, and large companies that obscured individual creator identities, common in the available and canonical history of video games. There are so many people who have been left out, whether by omission of their work or inability to safely enter the space to do that work in the first place. As we continue to explore and build the Syd Bolton Collection the library aims to do better to create an inclusive collection and welcomes all researchers, visitors, and players to explore and make history.

Credits: This exhibition is organized and curated by Amelia Clarkson, Media Collections Librarian, with photography assistance from Hannah Chafe, Graduate Student Reference Assistant.