Bite-Sized Game History: The Smithsonian’s Animal Crossing Obsession, Game Characters Through the Years, and Ken Griffey Jr.

Welcome to another edition of Bite-Sized Game History!

This time around we’ll be looking at the Animal Crossing: New Horizons habits of a few librarians at the Smithsonian, an infographic that charts the evolution of more than a dozen game characters, and the time Ken Griffey Jr. and one lucky Nintendo Power reader got to play a game on the Kingdome’s big screen.

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has become a lifeline for a very large contingent of players over the last month, and this obsession has even taken over the hallowed halls of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

There’s a lot to do in New Horizons, but as you might have guessed, the folks at the Smithsonian are most interested in the game’s bustling fossil trade. While Blathers has been around since the very first edition of Animal Crossing, the librarians noticed that the fossils found on the New Horizons island bear a strong similarity to the “Lying Stones” of Johann Beringer.

He was a professor at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, and he was just as interested in fossils as Blathers. Beringer referred to them as “petrifactions” in his classes, and he hired a trio of diggers to search the nearby Mount Eibelstadt for the stones in 1725. While they found several genuine “petrifactions” on the mountain, the majority of their discoveries were actually “Lying Stones” created by two of the professor’s colleagues to trick him. And they didn’t just stop at petrified plants and animals. Beringer’s diggers even found “petrifactions” of shooting stars, sunbursts, and angels!

The professor eventually came to his senses and disposed of his fraudulent collection, but not before publishing a book with drawings that likely inspired Animal Crossing‘s developers at Nintendo. You can see more in the thread embedded below, and in a great article about the “Lying Stones” by Alexandra Alvis at the Smithsonian’s Unbound blog.

Infographics seem to finally be waning in popularity on social media, but every once in a while you stumble across a good one, like this image recently shared by @Segamastertim that shows how a wide range of game characters have looked over the years.

PlaygroundEquipment.com commissioned the image, presumably as a way to drive unsuspecting social media users to their website, and in addition to obvious picks like Mario, Sonic, and Link, it also features characters like Donkey Kong, Princess Zelda, Solid Snake, and Sonya Blade from the 1980s to today:

This is so good to look through the years with the development of these characters

Images sourced from http://mariowiki.com and http://fandom.com

— SegaMasterTim (@Segamastertim) April 18, 2020

[Tweet Deleted – View at Internet Archive]

Aside from the mid-decade strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series, the 90s were an exciting time to be a baseball fan. And no one lit up the diamond quite like Ken Griffey Jr.

“The Kid” hit harder, ran faster, and jumped higher than anyone else playing the game. Off the field, Griffey was an avid gamer and had a close relationship with both Nintendo (who made him the face of their Major League Baseball franchise) and Midway (who secretly produced a custom NBA Jam cabinet that included him as a playable character). He single-handedly put card manufacturer Upper Deck on the map and launched the graded collectibles industry thanks to a highly-sought-after rookie card. Oh, and he was the MVP from the softball episode of The Simpsons too.

But he might be best remembered for a mad scramble from first to home that clinched the 1995 Division Series for the Seattle Mariners. Though they exited the playoffs in the next round, Nintendo immortalized this moment a year later with the release of Ken Griffey Jr’s Winning Run for the Super NES.

Basically, he was as cool as an athlete could be, and a Nintendo Power contest promising a meet-and-greet with Griffey turned out to be a grand slam idea.

The final pages of the June 1996 issue (Volume 85) screamed “Play Ball With Ken Griffey Jr.!” and fans responded with postcards by the truckload. But only one could take home the top prize, which was announced a few months later in Volume 90. As shared by Reyan Ali, a kid named Aaron Martin got to do battle with “The Kid” at his own game. Seated next to each other in Seattle’s dugout, they played two games of Ken Griffey Jr’s Winning Run on the scoreboard at the Kingdome, and while Griffey took the first game, Aaron put up an 8-0 score to win the second game of their doubleheader:

Thanks to the librarians at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, @Segamastertim, and Reyan Ali for sharing these bits of game history!

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.