Community Event: The Circle’s Panel At The American Museum of Natural History |

Photos by Libe Ackerman, except where noted.

Recently, the New York Videogame Critics Circle was thrilled to partner with the American Museum of Natural History. Our first event with the historic, 145 year old museum on Manhattan’s Upper West Side included a spirited panel comprised of Circle members Sherri Smith, Dan Ackerman, Matt Gerardi and Felicia Miranda. Circle founder Harold Goldberg moderated.

Choosing a topic was a slam-dunk: it had to be something about the museum’s latest exhibit, the T.rex. So after discussing topics with the museum’s event staff, we chose to speak about how the ferocious dinosaur, a therapod which could grow to nearly 42 feet in length, 15 tons in weight and yet exist with those tiny, meter-long forelimbs, has been portrayed in games. The night at the museum was part of Teen Game Night, a fairly lavish event which included catered snack food like the fabled dino nuggets and T.rex burgers in the futuristic Cullman Hall of the Universe.

The games we talked about included Primal Rage (remember Sauron’s finishing moves?), the tamer Lego Jurassic World (kids, ride the dinosaur!) Super Mario Odyssey (inhabit the dinosaur and clunk around), Skylanders: Trap Team (as Chopper, you’re a T.rex with helicopter rotors on your head) and Fossil Fighters (dig up and x-ray the dino bones on the Nintendo DS).

For attendees to play, Dan Ackerman brought a prototype of Techlandia, his upcoming board game. While it has nothing to do with dinosaurs, the wondrous complexity in the game about technology, Twitter and supernatural evil drew us all in to its strange, Lovecraftian world. Later, some of us partied with the legendary T.rex himself, as you’ll see below. We hope you enjoy these photos by Libe Ackerman.