When we hear someone talking about the museums, we think of The Louvre in Paris, Mona Lisa, remains of mummies, and fossilised dinosaurs. The word museum has come from Latin, which means a place devoted to the study of art. It is a haven for preserving icons and pieces of forgotten times: a tribute and reminiscence of the past.
Video games are now considered an integral part of digital art, though film critic Roger Ebert didn’t agree to that earlier. Video games museums guard technology that has now become obsolete. In a video game museum, you will find old Nintendo’s games and Atari consoles, big old pinball machines, and more. They were fun, pure and unadulterated. Players need not fish for any cheat codes like fortnite hacks to understand or win the game.
Video game museums have a fan base within the close-knit community. The concept is still in its nascent stages. But gradually, these establishments are popping up in every corner of the world. Let us take a look at some of the finest specimens.
Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment
The museum celebrates the birth and journey of technology as a medium of art. MADE is the brainchild of Alex Handy and Stanford Curator Dr Henry Lowood. One of its kind museums came into being through a Kickstarter campaign in California. Other than collecting vintage games, the museum offers a weekend course, Scratch Programming, for game development. It also organises Game Jams. It is a competition where developers design a game from scratch. Super Smash Bros tournament is a part of annual activity. The museum supports NeoHabitat, an open-source project where contributions are welcomes to restore Habitat in its primary form from 1986.
The Centre for Computing History
It is a museum in Cambridge, England that houses some of the most primary computing gadgets from old times like vintage computers, comptometers, Altair 8800 microcomputer, a mega processor designed by James Newman and Apple II series. The museum boasts of having a range of rare 13,000 video games under its roof. People can find musings of the great minds and challenges they face while preserving contemporary video games. Under their Video Game Heritage and Preservation section, they have beautifully spelt out their concerns and accomplishments. The place also preserves the source code of the games, outdated hardware, and long-lost operating systems.
Huis Ten Bosch Game Museum and The Miraikan
Huis Ten Bosch Museum is located in the city of Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. The museum was a part of a restoration project to recreate a 17th-century Dutch village. The museum has an amazing collection of consoles from the 80s, such as Vectrex and Nintendo 64DD. If you are planning to relive your childhood or experience the bygone era, this is a place you would never want to be.
Miraikan, also goes as the name of National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, is located in Kyoto, Japan. The museum offers visitors to chose from 120 games that include Space Invaders to modern CS: GO.
Pacific Pinball Museum
The establishment is a result of the sweat and blood of Michael Schiess. The former curator started collecting pinball machines in 2001, and in 2004, the Pacific Pinball Museum was born in California, USA. You can find bagatelles, vintage pinball machines, and games from as early as 1879. The museum has an 800 collection of games for visitor’s display. Visitors can play contemporary games such as The Twilight Zone and The Addams Family. The oldest machine is from 1879, a Montague Redgrave Parlor Bagatelle. Another feather in the cap is Bally Bumper, an art deco game of the 1930s.
International Center for the History of Electronic Games- The Strong Museum
The museum is an extended arm of The Strong National Museum of Play. It collects, analyses, and curate research on video games. The centre envisages capturing the development of electronic games on the timeline to understand people’s behaviour around video games and how they connect with each other across the platform despite cultural and demographical differences. The centre also supports The World Video Game Hall of Fame at Rochester, NYC, USA.
Computerspielemuseum or Computer Game Museum
It was touted as the biggest video games museum in the world by the Amazing Planet. It is located at the Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin. The museum was inaugurated on 21st January 2011. It has over 300 video games in its collection, and some of them date back to 1951. These marvels are displayed through a permanent exhibition named, Computer games: Evolution of a medium. The game cherishes classical technology and encourages visitors to experience it.
