While we were in NY visiting the in-laws, we were able to go to some children’s museum in Rochester (I think it’s called the Strong Museum of Play or something). It’s a really cool place with a lot of fun things for the kids (and parents) to do. We all really enjoyed ourselves.

One of the highlights of the museum for me was on the second floor where they had all these old school video and arcade games. It was awesome. On one computer, my son (Crash Kid #3) and I sat down and I started playing Sim City. Yes, the really old school Sim City. I remember countless hours playing it. Turns out, I still love the game and my son might love it even more. He’s asked a few times if we can play that game again.

By shear coincidence, today I saw that the Web Archive (home to the awesome Wayback Machine) has started creating a library of MS-DOS based video games. The three that grabbed my attention were Oregon Trail, Bust-a-Move and of course Sim City. Pretty awesome and I love that their keeping a record of all these old school games and making them available for us to play.

I’ll admit that I’m not a huge video game guy. I chose my marriage over video games, but that’s that story for another day. However, I do love to occasionally binge on a game or two. Most new games take too much time and attention to learn and enjoy. So, these old school video games are much better for some binge video game playing. Plus, I love nostalgia and seeing games like Oregon Trail takes me back to elementary school. The problem in elementary school was that our computer time was never enough to actually complete the game. We’ll see if I have the time now.