About Collections

The Strong^® owns and cares for the world’s most comprehensive collection of toys, dolls, games, electronic games, books, photographs, documents, and other historical materials related to play. These provide the foundation for The Strong’s mission to explore play and the ways in which it encourages learning, creativity, and discovery and illuminates cultural history.

Recent acquisitions

Recent acquisitions to The Strong’s collections include the Westwood Studios Collection, hundreds of artifacts chronicling the company’s innovative history from its earliest days to 2003, with emphasis on its role in the development and popularization of first real time strategy (RTS) games; the Kevin Gifford Video Game Magazine Collection, a donation of more than 8,000 computer and video game magazines that document the evolution of the video game industry and the games it produced from the 1970s to the present; additions to the C. J. Rogers Papers, the most detailed long-term study of wolf pack behavior ever conducted; the Microsoft Collection, hundreds of artifacts chronicling the corporation's innovative gaming history along with several rare and significant prototypes; and more than 200 games from the personal collection of renowned game designer Sid Sackson.

Learn more about The Strong’s key collections holdings.

Collections organization

For purposes of management and interpretation, these collections are organized and maintained under three different Play Partners or programmatic arms of The Strong.

• The National Museum of Play at The Strong is home to hundreds of thousands of historical objects related to play, including an unparalleled collection of dolls, toys, and games.
• The International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) at The Strong houses and interprets the largest and most comprehensive public collection of video games, other electronic games, and game-related historical materials in the United States and one of the largest in the world.
• The 130,000-volume Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong holds a full spectrum of primary and secondary sources, including scholarly works, professional journals, other periodicals, trade catalogs, children’s books, and comic books. The library and archives is also home to nationally significant collections of personal papers, business records, and other materials related to play. ICHEG’s library and archival collections also reside there.

Online collections

Thousands of The Strong’s artifacts are on exhibit in the National Museum of Play and thousands more are accessible online, including examples of toys inducted into The Strong’s National Toy Hall of Fame. Additional artifacts are added online regularly. Information about collections in The Strong’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play is accessible through the online catalog of the library and archives.