Chances are that you may have never heard of Margaret Strong, but as a collector, I have the utmost respect for her endeavors that led to the creation of The Strong's National Museum of Play. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, she travelled the world and accumulated more than twenty-seven thousand dolls, as well as countless other items of interest – mostly toys. She expanded her home, already thirty rooms in size, by adding two gallery style wings. She had plans to add yet another wing and a lecture room to hold all the “goodies” but passed away in 1969 before ground had been broken.

In 1982, her dream became a reality when the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum opened its doors to the Rochester community. Now, as it is approaching its thirty year anniversary, the museum has expanded to over 282,000 square feet and serves a global audience. While the dolls are certainly still a centerpiece of the museum, now called The Strong's National Museum of Play, a large percentage of the facility is dedicated to interactive video games!

Personally, I first encountered The Strong after relocating to the Western New York area nearly a decade ago. I frequented the museum almost on a yearly basis, and make the 87 mile trek even more as a father. If you have been to any of the countless Children's Museums across the country, you might think that you know what to expect; but if you ever make it to the Strong, you'll quickly realize that you are wrong.

The museum is full of activities such as a mock grocery store operated by children, lands straight out of fairy tale fiction, and an enormous homage to comic books and their heroes and heroines. The structure houses a carousel, the Strong Express train, a 1700-gallon coral reef aquarium, an impressive Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden and more. You can even take a stroll down the set of Sesame Street.

In addition to the permanent fixtures, The Strong features a series of very special rotating exhibits that change from time to time. At the moment, The Strong is home to “Football: The Exhibit” but in 2009, The Strong was home to Videotopia, an international traveling video game museum. I have seen Videotopia at other locales, but The Strong gave it the space it needed to really shine. The display was so popular, that The Strong actually purchased the Videotopia's coin-op inventory and now rotates over 120 vintage arcade games from an era long gone and sorely missed. Notable machines include the first coin-op Computer Space dressed in fiberglass, PONG and the vector-based Lunar Lander. Most of the machines are playable and cost less than the original price of admission in the early eighties when arcades were king!

Interactive exhibits abound, but when you walk up to the second floor, prepare to be, well… floored! Upon entering The Strong's eGameRevolution, you're first greeted by life-size statues of Sonic the Hedgehog and Link from The Legend of Zelda series. Next visitors encounter a multi-paneled timeline of sorts displaying hundreds of rare items, out of the massive thirty-five thousand plus items that The Strong's International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) department has archived.

Mingling within the historical segment are many interactive exhibits including a giant Lite-Brite-like Pixel Wall and an LED Lightspace Dance Floor which features a pressure sensing interactive display with effects that integrate with the lighting and music emanating from the sound system.

The Nintendo game Pac-man vs. has leapt from the Nintendo GameCube and GameBoy Advance systems into The Strong in a slightly modified form referred to as Pac-Man Battle Royal. Being the first four-player competitive Pac-Man arcade title, players attempt to be the last Pac-Man standing, as each player tries to gobble up the competition.

If you ever watched the 1983 cult-classic video game movie Joysticks, then it is certain that you have always wished to play a videogame using a massive joystick such as the ones featured in the film. Well, you can live that fantasy playing Giant Tetris on a massive 47” monitor to match. Sega only manufactured ten such units and The Strong is the only place in North America where you can drop tetrominoes with giant red and green joysticks measuring approximately four feet in size!

Emulator stations also grace the floor where you can replay the likes of Gabriel Knight, or even play the adventure game from the golden era King's Quest. Between the games, consoles, documents and other video game related media, The Strong has done a fantastic job illustrating how video games are conceived, developed, sold and used.

The Strong's CHEG has even hosted scoring competitions for entry into the Guinness Book of World Records, such as when champion Lonnie McDonald ‘rolled' the classic game of Joust for over six hours! The term ‘rolling' refers to maxing out the highest possible score causing the score counter to begin again at zero. In this particular case, the Joust arcade machine maxed out at 9,999,999 points and repeated, counting upwards again.