Museum of Play

We spent today at the National Museum of Play (click here for their official website) in Rochester. The place is chock-full of fun stuff; in particular, the whole family got a kick out of all the classic arcade games. Here's a shot of us getting ready for a four-player game of Gauntlet.

The kids tended to shoot the food -- rookie mistake! -- so we didn't survive many levels.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see all the nods to D&D history. They had the first-ever D&D video game, which, as I understand it, was a pretty basic and generic dungeon-crawler -- but at the very least a spiritual ancestor of the many awesome D&D games that have followed in its wake.

Elsewhere, a display case included some notes about RPGs in general and the foundational role played by D&D itself. They had some of the earliest D&D products as well as a sampling of modules, dice, miniatures, and non-D&D RPGs. Here's one side of the display...

And here is the adjacent side...

I kind of feel like I could have pulled a better display of RPG history out of my ass...ets. My own assets, as it were. Even after discarding so many RPG products from yesteryear, I still have a lot of the most iconic items, such as the First Edition D&D PHB and the first Basic set. Still, it was great to see D&D featured in as amazing and wondrous a place as the Museum of Play.