Imagine getting paid to build super-sized toys. The world’s biggest.
There is a small team of folks at Rochester’s Strong Museum of Play whose job is just that.
“Every day is like more play for me than work — even though what we do is very serious work,” said Matt Drew, an exhibit fabricator at the museum.
Recently he’s been working on a lift, high in the air, building a 20-foot-tall, playable Donkey Kong arcade game that is hung off the side of an elevated walkway. It’s a much different vibe than his old job in residential construction.
“But I know that my kids get tired of hearing about Donkey Kong at the dinner table at night,” Drew said, and is only half joking.
This, and another of Drew’s projects — a wall-sized electronic Chutes and Ladders game — are thought to be the largest in the world. Biggest arcade game. Biggest board game. But these are just a couple of the new super-sized toys to be featured in a massive, $65 million museum expansion adding two acres of exhibits and storage space to the museum.
Opening Day is June 30.
The giant Donkey Kong game was built as an exact replica of the original, but durable enough to withstand yanking, banging and twisting from hundreds of thousands of museum visitors.
“People think of us as a children’s museum,” said Jon-Paul Dyson, the museum’s vice president of exhibits. “We’re really a history museum. But really a play museum.”
For children of all ages. Attendance here is almost evenly split between children and adults, with 52% being people 16 and older, he said.
Finding a foothold
The focus of the expansion is on electronic games — video games, specifically — that chronicle and influence how we live, learn, work and play.
"Video games are an enormous industry,” Dyson said. “They're bigger by revenue than movies and music combined.”
Market experts say COVID-19 lockdowns supercharged the industry’s growth in recent years, pushing annual revenues to $180 billion. Reports show top games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty bring in more these days than blockbuster movies like “Avatar.”
"They're a new type of art form and play form,” Dyson continued. “They're having a seismic impact ... for entertainment but also for learning, even for emotion producing. And so this is a chance to really celebrate that and give people a reason to come and experience it together."
But before jumping straight into building a giant arcade game, Dyson and his 16-person exhibits team had to do their research and gain credibility in the industry.
“‘Why Rochester?’ was a question that we got early on,” Dyson said.
Proclaiming to be home to the National Toy Hall of Fame, World Video Game Hall of Fame and International Center for the History of Electronic Games isn’t enough. They became experts in the field of video and other electronic games. And have been building their collection since 2006.
Fast-forward to today, and the museum’s electronic games collection encompasses some 400 pinball and arcade machines, 65,000 video games, and hundreds of thousands of notes, sketches and other archival materials. Far more than will ever make it to the exhibit floor.
“Having these artifacts allows us to tell this story of global interchange between the producers, the players, and culture in general,” Dyson said.
In one of several expansive storage rooms, among row after row of pinball and arcade machines, are the prototypes for Asteroids, with hand-drawn art on it, and Maze Invaders, a cross between Pac-Man and Space Invaders that Atari never released.
And in another row, Marble Madness, designed by Mark Cerny when he was 18 years old. Four decades later, Cerny is a main architect of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
There are rarities like Atomic Bomber, a game released in 1946, where the player drops bombs on highlighted targets. And new arrivals, like Beat Mania, which is from Japan.
Plan, design, build
“It is pretty mind-blowing, honestly,” museum staffer Elliot Drury said of his job as an exhibit designer.
He trained as a woodworker and a furniture maker and worked as a systems engineer for a chemical company before coming to work at the museum. Now going into his eighth year, his projects have included a Lego wall and a Women in Games exhibit and, in the expansion, an interactive game created by the staff called Level Up.
Crafting these exhibits is no easy task. And it all starts with brainstorming sessions that are sometimes remarkable.
“Those are wild meetings,” Drury said. “You just got your notepad out and you're writing down everything. And why not? Because at this point, we don't need to talk about budget, we don't need to talk about, you know, the nuts and bolts of the engineering.”
It was at one of those meetings that Dyson suggested a fire-breathing dragon.
“As he says it, we all laugh,” Drury recalled. “And then he's like, ‘Well, I was sort of half-kidding.’ And then it really went from there.”
From the archive: Get a sneak peek of the Museum of Play's $65M expansion
The five-headed beast — able to breathe actual fire and mimicking a dragon god from role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons — should be installed next month. A company in Minnesota is building it. But other exhibits are being made right here, in the inner workings of the museum itself, complete with woodworking shops, computerized routers and 3D printers.
“By having someone in the design and fabrication capabilities in house, it gives us a lot of fine-tuned control over what we're producing,” Dyson said.
More to come
Imagine getting paid to come up with all this. To design it. To build it. To go to work each day at the Museum of Play.
Drury, the exhibit designer, grew up coming here. Now he is a dad, with two young daughters. His older daughter is 4 going on 5.
“It's hard to leave in the mornings, knowing where I go,” Drury said with a laugh. " Because she wants to go. ... I gotta tell her, ‘It's work. I’ll go do my work. You go to school, you have your fun, and we'll do it for each other, you know?’”
Back out on the floor, the expansion space is coming together quickly, moving toward the June 30 opening. In the half-finished shell, he sees what’s to come.
Large projection screens over here, where you’ll be able play giant versions of some games. Statues of video game characters over there. And in another section, a giant virtual playground where you’ll be throwing real playground balls at targets on the wall.
There is testing and adjustments to be made. And future exhibits to plan.
There are always more projects in the queue.
Down the road? A major exhibit on the history of game shows. An original “Family Feud” cabinet and other items just arrived.
“We have a whole lineup of things coming forward,” Dyson said. “This expansion is not a period, it's a comma.”
