The Sid Sackson Portal

The Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play at The Strong has developed a new online archive devoted to prolific game designer, author, and collector, Sid Sackson. Launched in October 2021, the Sid Sackson Portal compiles his diaries, game design notes, professional correspondence, game descriptions, and manuscript drafts into a single online repository.

Visitors have access to digitized versions of Sackson’s 35 years of diary entries (in more than 15,000 image files), in which he meticulously documented his daily professional activities in game design, development, and collecting. The portal also includes hundreds of photographs of game prototypes and published games held in The Strong’s collection, plus biographical information and a glossary of people, games, corporations, and publications that Sackson often referenced.

The museum has also launched a transcription project to make the portal even more helpful to researchers. Through crowdsourcing, The Strong is allowing interested volunteers armed with MediaWiki accounts to transcribe individual diary pages, with the goal of having full transcriptions of every entry. So far, the 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967 diaries have been fully transcribed, reviewed, and approved for online use.