where do we go from here now that all of the children are growing up and how do we spend our lives if there's no one who'll lend us a hand it's time for another pinball profile on your host jeff teels you can find everything on pinballprofile.com. We're on Facebook. We're on Twitter, x at pinballprofile. You can email pinballprofile at gmail.com. If you'd like to show your support, don't worry. It's not necessary. The show will always be free, but thank you to those that do show your support at patreon.com slash pinballprofile. Thanks to Lua W., GME Law, Cliff A., Colin A., Jerry S., and so many others. We appreciate you again on Patreon. This is a real treat. Now, I was coming to Rochester anyway because I love the Rochester Pinball Collective. It's such a great event. There's this December event going on. And, of course, many of us will be back here in March for the North American Championship Series and also the Stern Pro Circuit event, Pinmasters. If you haven't signed up, you can still do so for certainly Pinmasters. And maybe you'll get lucky or skilled, whatever you want to call it, and win your province or your state in January, and you will be right here in Rochester. Well, when you come to Rochester, what you have to do, I insist you must do, is come to the Strong National Museum of Play, which I knew a little bit about. Actually, I knew a lot about it. I just really didn't know everything about it. And now I'm learning about it, and I'm here with Jeremy Saussure. Jeremy, you have, first of all, a big title. Tell people what you do. I'm Assistant Vice President for Interpretation and Electronic Games, and I also edit the Strong's American Journal of Play. We're going to get into why we're here, But just a little quick history of The Strong, named after Margaret Strong, who loved play and realized that it's a great learning tool. And this museum is in her honor. But give us a little history on Margaret Strong. Sure, yeah. Margaret Woodbury Strong grew up in Rochester, and she collected things throughout her life. And she ended up going to the New York Board of Regents in 1968, actually getting a charter for a museum of fascination, as she called it. She had people coming to her house to see all of her dolls and her dollhouses, but she collected many, many things. Unfortunately for Margaret, fortunately for us today, she passed away in 1969 and left behind in her will the instructions to take money and to create a museum. So that's 1969. She was at the time reportedly the single largest shareholder of Eastman Kodak stock. So there was a lot of money at the time. And so what happened was that over a period of about a decade, they worked on how would this work for a museum, right, taking her collection. So ultimately, we opened to the public in 1982, but we were not a museum about play. It's just not where we started. Well, we've come a long way since that time, and we're going to talk about the different aspects. When you think play, what do you think of? You listen to Pinball Profile, you think of pinball. Oh, yeah, there's pinball. There's video games. In fact, the Video Game Hall of Fame is right here at the Strong National Museum of Play, and that's been here for a while, but also, too, and actually you might have just recently heard of this on the news because it happens every year, the Toy Hall of Fame as well. And you think, oh, these classic things that you enjoy like Twister and Monopoly and all these things. there's a hall of fame for that it's right here in rochester yeah definitely this and this year we inducted three toys uh transformers my little pony and phase 10 the card game so it was a very uh it was a great year for the 1980s so if you're someone who grew up during that period i'm sure these are all toys that you played with they're beloved and they played a really important role in our lives and they still do today i saw just walking through here and i I, listen, I've been here for 20 minutes now. I could spend hours here and I still haven't seen everything. But just walking here to get to do the interview with Jeremy, you know, I'm looking at that looks a lot like Sesame Street. That's a whole Dungeons and Dragons section, which is pretty exciting with the 50th anniversary. There's, oh, look at this. There's a pinball section. All right. And not just anything pinball. Is that what I think it is? Yeah, it is. It's the original Humpty Dumpty. It's, is that what I see? Lord of the Rings, a George Gomez kind of Whitewood, if you will. You've got some neat things here. Yeah. So pinball is, of course, part of play. And since we're the National Museum of Play, we have more than half a million objects related to the history of play. And so pinball is a really big part of that. And so this exhibit, Pinball Playfields, it features a lot of games that you can play. There's a section just on Stern pinball machines that we have in part through a partnership with Stern, but also these kind of original artifacts from the past, right, to show the evolution of pinball as a game, the pinball play field itself, everything from the, you know, whiffle, where you essentially have a piece of wood with pins and scoring holes, to Humpty Dumpty, where you're introducing interactivity of a different kind with flippers. And even things like George's whitewood prototype showing you kind of how designers actually go about constructing these pinball machines, right? Taking them from concept to an actual product. Forget CAD now and how things are done on computers and stuff. I saw on the wall walking through here, those are Harry Williams designs that we're seeing. And again, I want to go back after this interview to see more and, again, encourage you when you come to Rochester, New York, to see this. But the artifacts are blowing me away because we can play pinball anywhere. But to see these unique pieces of history, it's something. Yeah, I mean, we've been really incredibly fortunate and we're honored to care for those kinds of materials, right? So working with folks like Duncan Brown and Larry DeMar and with WMS, we were able to bring in a collection of original playfield drawings going back to the second game that Harry Williams created for Williams Manufacturing and going up through the 1990s. And so we have those original playfield sketches. It's a great way to show process, right? You look in this exhibit at Mark Ritchie's drawings for Indiana Jones, and you're seeing all the little erasures, right? How much work actually goes into creating a pinball machine Jeremy we always see the finished product We never see the process and that what fascinating And especially pre days when these are all hand and it's, look at that graph paper and seeing the designs and the geometry of this and that. And to us knowing where it has gone to today with the finished product, we're getting kind of sneak peek, pull back the curtain and see how this is done. Yeah, absolutely. And we have our Brian Sutton Smith Library and Archives of Play has an extensive collection of original archival materials because not only do we have the play things, right, the pinball machines, the arcade video games, right, the toy machines. Yeah, not only do we have the play things themselves, but we also have these materials that help shed light on how they were developed, how they were played with, how they were marketed. And so we have, for pinball, we have materials from Atari's coin-op. So looking at even materials where it's like, these are the original engineering drawings for Hercules. These are materials related to the engineering department at Williams. We have the original bills and materials for Bally games going back to the 1930s. You don't want to show that. People will be upset now when they see the cost today. So you better hold that one back, Jeremy. Why I'm here today is because you reached out to myself and some other publications about kind of a new exhibit that we're going to be seeing here. And you showed me a little bit as you're really setting it up right now. But it's near and dear to so many people's hearts here, certainly in New York State, when we think of the late, great Steve Epstein and what he did with Broadway Arcade, what he did with the creation of Papa, the creation really of competitive pinball, which is what brought me to Rochester for a tournament this weekend. and why so many people will come to the RPC to the event in March too and why you're going to see a lot of pinball players walk through here is because of what Steve did to kind of create this addictive hobby, if you will, that has some competitiveness to it but really has become more than that. It's just a safe space for a lot of people. And tell us what you've got going on with Steve Epstein. So Steve was such an iconic figure in the history of coin op and the history of pinball in particular. And so after he had passed, we as a museum worked with Roger Sharp and Steve's family to really to in part honor him, but also to bring materials into the collection that would allow us to preserve his legacy in a different way. And that's to say that we're preserving materials related to his work that 100 years from now, people will be able to use these materials to understand what Steve did, to understand the Broadway arcade, which is unfortunately long gone. But in this case, we were able to acquire some original documents, stuff related to Steve's work, creating with Roger Sharp and others, Papa, his work with the Broadway Arcade, his publicity. There are scrapbooks. There's photographs. There's this beautiful photograph with his dad, David, from the 60s. There's all these materials, including videos, some of which photographs and videos are on display in our Infinity Arcade exhibit. Particularly, this is an exhibit that focuses on the history of coin op. And so there is incredible video from inside the Broadway arcade from the 80s and the 90s that, you know, just was remarkable to see. It's going to bring back memories big time. I was lucky enough to go there once, but I was very young, long since forgotten, and really didn't know how much that would affect me and what I do later on in life in this pinball hobby and pinball media, if you will. Well, to see those videos, to bring it back to life in a way, certainly is going to be something that is really touching to those that knew Steve, those that remember the heyday of, my gosh, it's right there on Broadway. And this wonderful event that hosted Lou Reed's wedding reception and how the creation of what we've come to today really started a lot there with Steve, with Roger and some of the others, too. This is exciting. Yeah, it is. And, you know, as a historian myself and someone who has worked a lot with the coin op community over the years, Steve has just been so important to this history. And the operator, the person who owns the arcade, what I often refer to as kind of the front line of the coin op industry is really that's an area that isn't very much talked about in the history of coin op. It's usually you're talking about the developers of the game. So true. We do talk about Harry Williams. We do talk about some of these creators that kept it going. But somebody's got to foot the bill and give us the location to be able to play these and to maintain the games. Because if they're not maintained, you're not going to enjoy yourself. That thing just took my quarter. I'm not playing ever again. Pinball is stupid. But when you have people like Steve and operators that really take care and really help us grow it and they spend the money to bring in the newest games. It was just such an important part of our history of Americana. And again, your focus on operators is something that we really haven't seen a lot of. And I'm telling you, there's a lot of operators that listen to this podcast that are going to be going here, here. You know, hail to the operators, 100%. Yeah, and I would say to those operators that that's an area that we would love to continue to collect, you know, stories and materials that help tell those stories. So this is really a beginning, I think, in some ways, because Steve was such a great evangelist for pinball and the arcade. He understood better than I think most the ways in which coin-op games and pinball brought people together. And so the social aspects of play that we really focus quite a lot at here at the museum. And he understood that. And he, you know, being in New York City and the location that he was in for so many years, he was bringing in people from New York from all backgrounds, but also travelers from all backgrounds. And so that's one of the ways that – one of the really special things that play can do. It can kind of cross these cultural boundaries, language, class, all of these things. And I think Steve understood that more than most because he saw it every day and he had this sort of secret code, the secret sauce to get through to people. And so his is such a remarkable story. I hope it the beginning of us collecting and telling more stories of these operators and the work that they do People listening right now are going I got some stories Where do they reach you? So you could please come to the Strong's website, thestrong.org or museumofplay.org. You can also reach me by email, jsaussier at museumofplay.org. and we're on Facebook, we're on X, Instagram, all those places. Please reach out. Because of everything you have here at The Strong, you've seen toys that have come and gone. They, for whatever reason, just fell out of favor. Technologies maybe changed things. Our attention spans have changed in what we like to consume. When you think of pinball, and pinball's had some dark days too where arcades like Broadway Arcade shut down. There was a period in the late 90s where home consoles were just, it was more affordable for me to spend the money on a PlayStation, a Sega Genesis, a Nintendo, an Atari. I don't need to go out to do this, this, this. And we saw it as pinball players when, look at that Space Invaders. Wow, that's pretty cool. Look at Pac-Man. Look at all these video games that took attention away from pinball and what the arcades really were all about. And from an operator's standpoint, it was like, hey, this is easier to maintain than the 3,000 moving parts in a pinball machine. So the arcades kind of slipped away. They've come back with the family centers now, the Dave & Buster's and things like that, Chuck E. Cheese and all those type places, and just even actual arcades and barcades. And whether it's nostalgia, I like to think it's the fact people are discovering and going, holy cow, is this ever fun? When you think of pinball and the history of play and the history of toys and games, This shouldn't be surprising that it has stood the test of time. No, and I think when you look at the larger history of play, right, and one of the things that we are able to do here, and you see this when you come, is that you can put pinball within the context of board games, of earlier coin-op games, of video games, right? all of these things, right? So that we understand and try to interpret this much longer history to show, you know, I think you're right in some ways that there was a kind of decline. I like to look at it where it evolved. The arcade evolved. You know, the early 20th century, you had penny arcades, they changed, right? When pinball was introduced, that changed the arcade, that changed coin op as a space for many, many years. Video games changed, redemption, right? So the arcade, it's definitely had its peaks and valleys in terms of how many of them. But part of, I think, the history we want to get at too, is that the arcade endures in a variety of forms. And certainly I, as a pinball player, as in part a celebrant of pinball, am delighted that so many people are making pinball machines, that people are making homebrew pinball machines. My sweet spot right there. Yeah, I mean, so to me, yes, it's not a surprise that this is a form with all of its depth of play from its artwork to, you know, to its interactivity with the different features. It's incredible. But at the same time, it's also not surprising that it's stood the test of time. You talked about how we've evolved, really, and the arcades have evolved. I think part of those quote-unquote dark times in the late 90s and stuff was sadly we lost some pinball companies that were making these games. Maybe they went to slot machines or whatever they went to or just went by the wayside. But now here we are in 2024 coming up to 2025 and we look at the number of companies that are successful in making pinball machines. And the homebrew people and the leagues and the players and the IFPA and just the tournaments you find everywhere, the interest might never be higher. Like people talk about the golden days of the Bally Williams days, certainly the sweet spot, because that's when I was young and that's when I got into it. But I think we're in the sweet spot right now. I think we're only getting better and growing. Yeah, I I think so, too. You know, I'm so excited to see for me. It's like I live in the past so much because I'm, you know, right. So, you know, I'm excited to be able to bring collections like Steve's into the museum where we can preserve it and we can help tell the story. but also allow people years from now to use these as resources to write about, to tell these stories. But at the same time, I can't lie, I love seeing pinball thriving. And just like so many of your listeners, I remember walking into arcades. I remember playing pinball on locations in pizza places and convenience stores. So that clearly is like for so many people, it's a formative experience. and I don't know that without those experiences that I would be thinking about it and sort of studying it and collecting in quite the same way that I do today at The Strong. So as I'm certainly much older than probably many people listening to this podcast, the point is I remember seeing a pinball for the first time. I remember it was a Black Knight machine and I was just, what is this? Did that just talk to me? And what's this magnet and this and that and fell in love and wow, this is great. I remember those days. I still get excited 40 plus years later. You here at The Strong get to see people of all ages. And I'm imagining you're seeing a lot of young people as I do at pinball shows, see a pinball machine for the first time. And if they can see above the glass or maybe they're on a stool and they can plunge the ball, they're right into it. What do you see and what kind of excitement is it for you when you see young people first experience pinball? So it's incredibly gratifying to see young people introduced to pinball. And I think it's such an important point that you make because so much of what we see here at the museum is intergenerational play. Right. And because we are often introducing people to play things from the past, we very commonly see grandparents, parents and children and grandkids, you know, being introduced to something. And you hear things like, oh, they had toys when you were a kid, grandpa. Yeah, they were black and white. But yeah, before we had color. Sure. Yeah. So many times have I seen, I've seen the reaction of the person who hasn't played pinball in decades and was like, oh my God, they're still making them. Let me go into this exhibit. Oh, let me show you what I used to do in college. Let me show you what I used to do when I was a kid. It incredibly gratifying to see that And we see it every day here with people from zero to 100 And it not just pinball machines Certainly it the other forms of play here When I first walked in, I looked up and up and up, and I saw a huge Donkey Kong machine that Nintendo actually helped you with. And I can only imagine a child saying, you used to play that? How did you know? But you explained it's just a wonderful recreation of Donkey Kong. You've got some neat exhibits here. Yeah, we do. And that giant Donkey Kong. How big is it? You know what? I don't even remember. 50 feet? I mean, it's hanging off a bridge. It was so tall that we had to build it onto the wall between a bridge. And so that when you come into our admissions, you're walking under this giant Donkey Kong machine. But it's an incredible part, a really massive part of this new expansion of the museum that we opened in the summer of 2023. Yeah, so this is really new. If you've been to the Strong before, you're seeing a whole new one now because I think you were telling me, was it 90,000 square feet of really changes over the last couple of years? Yeah, we've added 90,000 square feet inside the building with about 25,000 square feet of exhibit space just dedicated to the history of electronic games. And it's our ESL Digital Worlds exhibit. And then on the outside, now we're, you know, in the middle of December now, but on the outside, we even added a space that is the Hasbro Game Park. And so this is an outdoor exhibit where you can play a giant Simon game. There's a fire-breathing dragon. And that's not hyperbole. It actually breathes fire from Dungeons & Dragons. So if you come, it's something to check out. What else are we going to see here? What are some of the other highlights you love here that maybe I haven't even seen yet? And I will in a second. But what else do you have here at the Strong? Yeah, so we have a number of exhibits. But one of my favorite artifacts is that sort of a must-see artifact if you come here is the prototype for Monopoly. So, you know, in my own household, we're very divided. Some people hate Monopoly. What? Others love it. But we have the original prototype for it. It's actually round. It's got hand-typed cards. It was created by Charles Darrow. Now, I should tell you, we also talk about where this game comes from. It was originally based on a game called The Landlord's Game, which was created by a woman, but ended up kind of being wiped out of that history. So we talk about that as well. But it's an incredible artifact to see if you're a board game enthusiast, you love the history of play in general. Who hasn't played Monopoly? The first time I ever pulled an all-nighter. It wasn't for studying for an exam. It was a summer night playing Monopoly. And I don't know if there were trades made to keep the players involved so that people didn't fade away. But what great history. I mean, McDonald's still does promotions. How many years after were they? Every fall they do get your Monopoly cards. It's, again, something that has stood the test of time. And we can see it on apps now. And you can play the actual physical board game. It's neat how, like arcades have evolved, how some of these toys and games have evolved. Yeah, so that's just one of the kind of must-see things that you'd see when you come. But we have exhibits on the history of figurative play, like stuffed animals and dolls and action figures. We have exhibits on the National Toy Halls of Fame. So you can come and see the toys that were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. But what's really important to emphasize here, too, is that we don't want you to just come and see these things. We want you to play, too. And so all of our exhibits are interactive. We're a play museum. So, yes, we want you to learn about the history of these playthings, how they were made, how and why we play with them. Why is it important for us to play, to even have play in our lives? We do it throughout our lives, not just our childhood. but it's also come here. It's an opportunity to play. And, you know, if you're older, play like a kid again. You walk in here and you think, oh, they must do a lot of school field trips and stuff. And I think that's certainly the case. But I know I come here in the summer for a Rochester's Red Wings baseball game and there's a hockey team here in town. So, hmm, all right, I'll go check. Maybe you're playing in a hockey tournament or baseball tournament. OK, well, I got some time to kill. Hey, look at this. And you would see, as I am through here, people of all different ages and all interactively playing. That's pretty special what you've got here. Yeah, thank you. I mean, obviously I'm biased. I'm saying it for you. We think so. But, yeah, it's a really unique place. And we're the only collections-based museum anywhere in the world that focuses solely on play. And so that you know that when you're coming here, you're getting an opportunity to learn about this history. You get an opportunity to play with some of these things or experiences that you didn't even imagine before coming here. But you're also learning about why it is important for you to play. Why? What's happening when we do this? Whether you're two or you're 102, why is it so important? See, now I could talk to you for easily another couple of hours. But unfortunately, I'm not able to this time. So I guess I just have to come back now. And I imagine there will be a lot of people listening here that are going to come to the Strong as well because you've got so much to see here. The square footage, the different elements, the Toy Hall of Fame, the Video Game Hall of Fame, the pinball, the interactivities. There's a lot, and it's a lot of fun here. Jeremy, thank you so much. Thank you so much, and I would welcome you back anytime. And as a token of gratitude, we are going to award somebody two passes to come here and enjoy the Strong National Museum of Play. Just email pinballprofile at gmail.com. We'll do a random draw and hope to see you here soon. And again, make plans to come here. Come to the Rochester Pinball Collective. Come to the Strong and you will be amazed. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find everything at pinballprofile.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram at pinballprofile. Email pinballprofile at gmail.com. And if you'd like to show your support on Patreon, that would be wonderful. Not necessarily. The show will always be free, but that's patreon.com slash pinballprofile. And thank you to great donators like Derek S., Derek K., Sean I., Tony V., and so many others. Here live at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, you'll want to come here too. I'm Jeff Teowles. Everybody play the game All around