Originally the brainchild of Keith Feinstein, Videotopia is a travelling

science museum A science museum is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, industry and industrial machinery, etc. Modern trends in mu ...

exhibition documenting the history of

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

s. It is based on a larger collection of video game machines, now housed at

The Strong The Strong is an interactive, collections-based educational institution in Rochester, New York, United States, devoted to the study and exploration of play. It carries out this mission through six programmatic arms called "Play Partners": * Nat ...

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a City (New York), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, the county seat, seat of Monroe County, New York, Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffalo, ...

Collection

It includes a wide range of commercial video arcade machines and game consoles, and also interactive

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...

kiosks containing information about the history of the games' development and their impact on popular culture. By 1996, the exhibit had had 20,000 attendees. In 1998, Feinstein's collection included 300 machines, and the touring exhibit had 75 of them. By 2009 the touring exhibition included 100 machines, and the collection amounted to 15,000 items relating to video games. Videotopia was operated by Feinstein's longtime curatorial partner Jeff Anderson, who maintained the exhibit's vast game collection, based in

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

. Later Jon-Paul Dyson took over and the collection moved to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at

. Videotopia has been featured at numerous science museums in the U.S., such as the

Franklin Institute The Franklin Institute is a science museum and the center of science education and research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is named after the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin. It houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memori ...

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

, as well as overseas and in selected performances of

Video Games Live Video Games Live (VGL) is a concert series created by Tommy Tallarico and originally founded by Tallarico and Jack Wall. The concerts consist of segments of video game music performed by a live orchestra with video footage and synchronized light ...

. Videotopia has been featured on television on

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainmen ...

: This Morning, the

History Channel History (formerly The History Channel from January 1, 1995 to February 15, 2008, stylized as HISTORY) is an American pay television network and flagship channel owned by A&E Networks, a joint venture between Hearst Communications and the Disney ...

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by the M ...

CNBC CNBC (formerly Consumer News and Business Channel) is an American basic cable business news channel. It provides business news programming on weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Eastern Time, while broadcasting talk sho ...

, and many local television news programs and written about in ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

'' magazine, ''

USA Today ''USA Today'' (stylized in all uppercase) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters in Tysons, Virgini ...

'',

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

, TICKET, and '' Next Generation''.

References

External links

* * {{cite web , url=http://www.videotopia.com/media/vt_cbs.wmv , title=Videotopia on CBS , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060831023244/http://www.videotopia.com/media/vt_cbs.wmv , archive-date=2006-08-31 Traveling exhibits History of science and technology in the United States Video game exhibitions