When I visited M05’s Musée Du Jeu Vidéo and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France during my university’s spring break in March 2026, I decided to visit London for the day. The urge to see the Design Museum’s “Wes Anderson: The Archives” and “Blitz: The Club that Shaped the 80s” was just too great. Paris can wait.

With my return booked for the last Eurostar train of the day, I had time for a quick visit to Waterstones near Russell Square. This branch’s proximity to UCL, Birkbeck University of London, and SOAS makes its fiction, history, and philosophy sections particularly rich. Plus, it’s a short stroll to St. Pancras for the return leg of my day trip.

Approaching the till with a fistful of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer crime novels – I wanted Penguin covers not easily available in the States – I saw, out of the corner of my eye Andreas Bernard’s Same Player Shoots Again: A Biography of the Pinball Machine. The title sprang at me like a kick-out mechanism on a pinball playfield. The word “biography” I know very well having devoted an entire book – Game After – to the lifecycle and afterlife cycle of video games. Bernard mixes, as I hope he would, his own biography with the pinball machines he experienced growing up in Munich and on holidays with his family or girlfriend.

Happening upon something one enjoys in public places – in my case Bernard’s short book, in his case pinball machines in cities and at seaside spots – is a circumstance very much at the heart of his deft blend of memoir with cultural history. Bernard reflects upon what we might call the “faded ubiquity” of pinball machines; how their once prevalent, everyday status has long expired. “Wasn’t my love of pinball,” Bernard writes, “always somehow related to the casual availability of these games? They were simply there, in bars and restaurants, public pools and bowling alleys, in the lobbies of movie theaters and in arcades; and if I didn’t search for them as systematically as Stefan and I once did on our Friday excursions, then you would discover them by pure chance.”

This self-reflection of Bernard’s relationship to pinball machines is shared late in the book after he stumbles upon an annual pinball tournament. Although the warehouse-size tournament offers an extraordinary number of machines – some known well by Bernard, others new to him – the sheer abundance of restored, well-maintained machines available to play lacked something in his estimation: they lacked the public ordinariness that he and his childhood friend once revered whether in the form of well-traversed pubs to play a favorite pinball machine like the Harlem Globetrotters or the “casual availability” enjoyed across everyday places where slipping in a coin was habitual, even routine.

The contrast accounted for by Bernard when describing the annual pinball tournament is between what-was-once-common and what is now mostly experienced through the efforts of connoisseurs, collectors, and enthusiast communities. It’s a move from the ordinary to the extra-ordinary, from the quotidian to the quixotic.

Bernard’s writing on the subject resonates with my observations on the exhibition of coin-op video games at annual events and in museums where I too can’t shake the feeling that something is missing in both contexts. Take for example California Extreme, the “Classic Arcade Games Show”. Each July at the Santa Clara Convention Center hundreds of coin-op machines are exhibited and set to free play. A weekend pass costs about $70 for which one gets to play in a crowded, sweaty convention site in the summer that always seems to reek of armpits and farts no matter how many electric fans are deployed.

 

What bugs me about these places (other than the smell) and that I’ve never quite managed to put into words finally materialized with Bernard’s use of the term, “promiscuity.” An event like California Extreme (I will add Brookefield, Illinois’s Galloping Ghost Arcade and the likes of Krakow’s Muzeum Gier Wideo and Budapest’s Flippermúzeum, where visitors pay by the hour to play a wealth of coin-op machines) offers more games than I would’ve ever experienced at any arcade to memory.

This characteristic alone stands in stark contrast to quarter sinking in days gone by. At these types of places today, we are spoiled for choice. The games work, technicians are readily available, unlike when you’d have to wait for an operator to repair or replace a machine. Game play is housed under rather ideal and diligently managed circumstances. Machines are cared for well. They are respected by players. We are surrounded by more fully functioning machines than we could ever seek out in our daily jaunts across familiar urban or suburban terrains.

Bernard’s claim of promiscuity isn’t down to availability and choice alone but reflects how we play. He notes rightly that the temptation to easily “switch from one game to the next after the first hint of disappointment” reduces the demands of endurance, the struggle with a specific machine when others were not around. One or two coin-op machines at a bar, restaurant, or convenience store demand our attention, our grind and determination, requires all our skill, whereas at California Extreme, especially when costs are abstracted by an admission fee, the risks are much lower, the act of play seemingly apathetic.

If I’m not satisfied with game play, I can abruptly stop playing an active game, move on, leave behind lives, play something else. I’ve approached so many machines with their game play abandoned, lives wasted, or an avatar simply waiting for someone to push its button. This blasé attitude I find peculiar. Are players disinterested? Is their game-play sensibility dulled by utter availability, overwhelming choice, overstimulation? Are they aware that their play time is finite as they scramble to play as many machines as possible? Promiscuity as in “playing around” is certainly on show. The thought of leaving a game would’ve never crossed my mind once a quarter was dropped (then again, I don’t like to leave behind a drop of alcohol in a glass either). The dropped quarter signaled commitment. It bought space and time in front of a particular machine. Devotion kept a player there.

Such promiscuity is an experience alien to my coin-op game play from the 70s to 90s. Yet, it’s a common occurrence I’ve observed at California Extreme’s “annual celebration.” There I always feel that I “dabble” in game play unlike the committed relationships that I built in my youth when playing say, a Moon Patrol or Star Castles machine located between the entrance and the check-out area of my local Safeway. There and then I played differently.

I played what was available and if hooked, I played a lot knowing that a newer machine would replace one of these I enjoyed if its earnings fell short. To me it felt like each drop of a quarter was an insurance policy on the lifespan of a particular game that I liked and my ability to have it at my fingertips for a prolonged duration. Coin-op machines weren’t just interactive objects but destinations; their graphically adorned heft constituted a place, a material coordinate for hanging out with friends after school, to pass time, shoplift candy, compete, or try for a personal top score. The utilitarian function of Safeway didn’t matter then. I wasn’t there to buy groceries. Only the store’s threshold where the games resided mattered.

With Bernard’s help, what becomes apparent to me is that annual events like California Extreme can return vintage machines, even renew our game play with them, but the idiosyncratic social experience of public places of play isn’t included in the admission, it’s irrelevant to the bounty of games on hand.

Considering that coin-op machines were designed and manufactured for public places, gained their notoriety – for good or bad – in everyday places as public amusements, and that the industry’s profit potential resided in each new public location – read, market – accessed, this situation of interactive artifacts stripped of their environments poses a unique challenge to museums. The conversation starter is whether ordinary, historical public play – play that was once so definitive to establishing the new phenomenon of video games across diverse public places – can be exhibited or conveyed to museum visitors?

Bernard heaps on more details when he describes the physical location of pinball machines in the bars and cafes of his youth: they had to be discovered inside a place unlike the prominent display of machines he’d encounter at “brightly lit arcades” typically, he notes, located by train stations. A pinball machine in a bar, Bernard shares, resided in “out-of-the-way places: in a narrow hallway in the back, where the restrooms and cigarette machine were located …”.

Far too often the cultural memory of public game play privileges the nostalgic scene of an arcade over, drawing from my own biography, a Ms. Pac Man machine tucked into a corner at a laundromat, Star Castles at a Safeway next to gumball and stamp machines, Frogger and Crazy Climber by the restrooms, pay phone, and cigarette machine at a restaurant, or a Slurpee shared alongside Defender at my local 7-Eleven where magazines like Soldier of Fortune once romanticized mercenary adventures in Angola and Uganda for boys.

“Street locations” like bars, restaurants, convenience stores, grocery stores, and laundromats elude game museums. There are attempts – earnest ones I should stress – at museums where an arcade space is assembled and made accessible to visitors. Such spaces are often separated from a museum’s other exhibits. Curated rooms are common, distinguished by lower lighting, interior decoration, and machines clustered or lined up tightly, side-by-side to signal arrangements and configurations once common at arcades. Or a specific exhibition space is delimited from surrounding exhibitions within the museum. Typically coin-ops will line walls, or their bulk will create rows facing inward, away from console or PC displays.

 

 

 

 

 

Such efforts, unfortunately, only reimagine one public place where coin-op machines resided. I’ve yet to see a recreation of a pizzeria with a Space Invaders in the corner, or a bar with a cocktail table coin-op (water marks included), or a bus station, or a billiards hall, or even 7-Eleven. Museums do a good job showing their visitors one slice of life, one institution of public game play: an imaginary arcade with no history, no specific location. In these instances, the reimagined arcade’s history, its location, its public is that of the museum. These aren’t historical recreations of any actual, local arcade, but a projection of a generalized social space exhibited as “an arcade.” (The closest that I’ve observed to anchoring a recreation to actual arcades is the Game On 2.0 exhibition in Edinburgh: a title card with QR code references local arcades like Sega Park, University Arcades, and Nobles Amusements.)

Can other public spaces be reimagined in museums? Can Bernard’s bars and cafes of Munich be reconstructed and exhibited at Berlin’s Computerspielmuseum? Let’s say that a local pizzeria in Rochester had a Space Invaders in its corner. Could that establishment be recreated at The Strong to help show that public game play wasn’t only in the form of arcade game play; and that the banality of everyday spaces was transformed by game play. Or, what if a bowling alley game room from the late 70s is recreated complete with its “18 and older” sign, worn billiard tables, cheap pitchers of shitty lite beer, cigarette machines, ashtrays, and rancid cigarette smoke piped in for authentic ambiance? Sounds gross by today’s standards. But such dank places of coin-op game play are part of the history of games, once a financial lifeline for the coin-op amusement industry and popular location of game play across daily life, sticky patina and all.

Sure, I treasure the memory of sneaking into a bowling alley’s age-restricted areas but my personal recollection of Bernard’s subject in his short book exceeds nostalgic accounts to warrant sustained considerations at museums where period rooms that exhibit the domestication of video game consoles in the home and reimagined arcades are already prevalent.

Bars, cafes, restaurants, convenience stores, and bowling alleys are examples of ordinary places where people played. These are diverse places of play where diverse people played: are people who played in bars the same as those who played in arcades, or are those who played a quick game of Phoenix while waiting for a thin-crust pizza to reach their table at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor the same type of player feeding quarters into a Gorf at a smoke-filled bowling alley? Public places of play are tapestries of different experiences, each place a window into the historical integration of technology into people’s everyday life and emergent patterns of living with games.

Street locations or simply ordinary, everyday places evidence the pervasive qualities of coin-op game play more than a place like the arcade dedicated to game play. At street locations coin-op machines marked everyday topographies in their “simply there” status. At arcades, games were confined, contained in shopping malls or devoted buildings without any plodding along to discover a machine at a window, near a toilet, in a basement, or nestled in the back corner of daily life’s common cracks and crevices.

Arcades were intentionally designed to display games; their thresholds bathed in excitement to tempt would-be players to enter. Coin-op machines at street locations had to contend with an existing interior, co-mingle with other objects, spaces, and services. These scenes demonstrate how existing public establishments situated coin-op machines into their interior spaces, ambiance, clientele, and financials; how a business adapted to and accommodated a public technology for amusement. (A common cry upon immediately entering a restaurant or once seated at a table was, “can I have a quarter.” My urge to check out the games superseded food. The place’s primary service rendered secondary.)

The challenge for a museum is ordinariness itself. That’s why reimagined arcade spaces have become synecdochical for the history of public game play. Because coin-op game play wasn’t restricted to a single place, because the industry wouldn’t have thrived as it did without skirting singular locations, this history isn’t easily contained, or better yet, installed and displayed. Still, to fully represent the social and economic experiences and situations of game history necessitates the combo of Space Invaders at a pizzeria… in a museum.

The post Museum Games #6 Space Evaders, Or How Ordinary Public Places of Coin-Op Play Challenge Museums appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

I landed in Vigo, but my luggage didn’t. At Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport my lone carry-on gorged the steel jaws of an Iberia Air Lines baggage sizer stationed like a vigilant sentry at the boarding gate. Common carry-on luggage size, I learned, doesn’t translate universally on all domestic flights.

I reluctantly checked my bag. Something I would never do on a 16-day research bender bopping across Spanish and Swiss cities. One night here, two nights there. Go. Go. Go. The fear of lost luggage looms like a thundercloud. My seatbelt clicked to an exhale of FUUuuuucccckkkk.

Luckily, it wasn’t lost. Neither however was it on the same flight as me.

“A súa equipaxe estará noutro voo desde Madrid,” an Iberia Air Lines representative explained to me.

I typed into my iPhone for translation. “On another flight,” Google translator spat out.

“Which one from Madrid?”

“Non o sabemos. Entregarémolo no teu hotel mañá pola mañá,” the representative replied.

“Mañá?” oh, “mañana,” more of a murmur to myself for comprehension.

The possibility of having to wait until tomorrow for my luggage didn’t jive with my tight schedule. So, I spent an expensive day taxiing back and forth between my hotel to Aeropuerto do Vigo desperately awaiting the arrival of my luggage on the next, or next, or the one after that flight from Madrid. This journey repeated so much that I even enjoyed the same taxi driver twice! Ola de novo, meu amigo. My bag eventually showed up around 7:00 p.m.

This inconvenience dampened my research spirit. I typically arrive early on the scene: buzzing from a rich blend of excitement and espresso. Step one: drop my bag at the hotel. Step two: hit the pavement. Step three: lose thy self in reveries. A city is charted on foot a full day before I visit the museum that lured me to its location. Walking allows me to observe how museums and other tourist destinations fit into a city’s cultural kaleidoscope.

In Vigo, that plan went pear-shaped. I missed the Museo do Mar de Galicia and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Regrettably, I never enjoyed the opportunity to drink in maritime history with a contemporary art chaser. Estrella Galicia meu amigo, the day’s only solace.

With sorrows drowned, fresh clothes welcomed upon my skin, a new day awaits. Outside my hotel the briny redolence of the Ría de Vigo bellows with seagulls as I wait for… another taxi. Relieved that this journey isn’t along the now familiar route to an airport, I’m off to the Museo Do Videoxogo (or MUVi for short) located in Cangas across Vigo Bay.

Snaking along the bay I spy a fleet of bateas, raft-like platforms for mussel farming. They crowd the bay, like a mighty armada at anchor. Thousands of mussels cultivate on thick ropes suspended from each platform. Here’s a safe bet: Galician gastronomy attracts tourists to the Ciudad De Vigo, in the province of Pontevedra, northwest Spain more than a video game museum way on the other side of the bay. Airlift MUVi to a more touristy location, I think to myself on the drive over. That would make a perfect pairing for a delicious welcome to Vigo: mussels and a museum of video games.

I arrived in Cagnas intentionally early. I like to “case the joint,” observe a museum at its location; see what’s around it, see if its video game theme extends to a café, restaurant, or retail shop. This often happens like in Sheffield where the National Videogame Museum is a short walk to the Extra Life Gaming Lounge. Strawberry & Skittles shakes galore.

MUVi doesn’t benefit from a direct companion unless you consider a hairdresser, fruteria, and a home furnishing store pertinent to the history of video games. The museum slots into retail spaces beneath an apartment block with a cool Candy Land inspired graffiti mural on one side and crappy graffiti tags on the other, like the word “sempiterno” spraypainted in blue. It translates to “everlasting.” Fitting that this word appears adjacent to a museum devoted to extending the life of video games.

Standing outside awaiting my tour guide, I remark to myself that MUVi’s giant window certainly surprises passers-by shopping for bananas. We can clearly glimpse a wealth of game-related artifacts.

 

Galo Martínez, one of the co-founders of the Fundación Museo do Videoxogo de Galicia, arrives amidst my reflection on bananas and video games. Other members of MUVi’s team turn up shortly after. Because MUVi is only open on Saturdays I had to arrange a special visit on a Thursday to adhere to my travel dates. This meant that my preference for visiting museums unannounced was blown. Don’t get me wrong, I remain grateful to Galo and his crew. Only I like to encounter a museum like any other visitor not as one writing about the museum visited. I fear special treatment that may prevent me from observing collections as others do. Plus, I suffer from a romantic personality: I like to think that I’m undercover, clandestinely gathering vital intel.

After introductions, we move inside. My initial observations from outside the window prove correct: artifacts in the museum’s main gallery are exhibited with care, a mindfulness of their arrangement expressed with a certain solitude so visitors can contemplate these games as museum artifacts. Game consoles are displayed upon matte white modular shelving units with each individual console – be it a Sega SG-1000 or Nintendo Super Famicon – granted space, top lit, and accompanied with title cards as expected.

Beyond the gallery, I witness other spaces devoted to interactive exhibits of computer, console, and coin-op machines. This, I’ve come to recognize, is an established convention in game museology: a mixture of playable hardware with non-playable hardware presented as artifacts. Hands-on. Hands-off.

I won’t say any more about these other spaces and collections here. That thread will be picked up later, in another installment. I’m rushing you through MUVi’s exhibits to arrive at a certain room that still seizes my attention.

The tour group ascends a short staircase. Two small rooms await. We crowd into the closest one dedicated to Galician game developer, Álex González Quintana, responsible for a game called, The Wall. It’s the first documented commercial game developed in the region. The room is minimally adorned, bathed in gallery white; intentionally modest to reduce distractions while affording maximum attention to select objects. This form of curation is quieting. Items that document game development include a cassette tape of The Wall, MSX 64K cartridge version, monitor displaying a playable game, tablet to scroll through for information on the game and its preservation at MUVi, along with a watchable interview that MUVi conducted with the developer. Wall labels accompanying these objects share the themes that explain this small exhibition’s mission: the documentation of local game development, public education, and preservation practices. Like MUVi’s gallery, objects in the small room are specified. They don’t compete with one another for our attention. Each is pedestaled. The cassette tape version of The Wall is displayed within a glass cube for protection.

 

Locked in conversation with Galo about the history of Galician games, I’m struck by a stark contrast as we step closer to the neighboring room. Peering inside this other small room, all those niceties of curation I witnessed next-door are abandoned.

No gallery white walls.

No pedestals showcase specific objects.

No object dons labels.

No premier game or developer resides at the center of this room.

It is cluttered instead with, what looks like, anonymous stuff you’d find in a teenager’s room circa mid-1980s or early 1990s. Caught off guard, I quickly go from calm and contemplative to feeling overwhelmed, spurred on by a vortex of things: all this mad stuff surrounding me, screaming out for my attention all at once.

 

My guided tour prompts the question of whether I am privy to a space off-limits to the public? One reserved only for team members to kick back, play games, watch TV, listen to music, or as a bed might suggest, have a nap during a slow day at the office cuddled up warmly in a Streets of Rage II duvet. It feels like I’m trespassing into a private domestic scene, familiar but not my own. I enter hesitantly: unsure where and how to step within this chaos, unsure what to look at, unsure if this room is part of the museum, or something else entirely.

My disorientation stems partly from my own ignorance of Galician. A big blue museum label appears right next to the entrance informing visitors of the room’s purpose and content. The museum label explains the transformation of video game play in Galicia from public places (arcades) in the 1970s to domestic settings in the 1980s and 1990s. The space is entitled, Habitación Da Memoria. It translates as a “memory room.” The full description reads as follows:

Na década de 1970, as persoas relacionábanse cos videoxogos principalmente en lugares públicos a través dos Arcades.

In the 1970s, people interacted with video games mainly in public places through the Arcades.

A medida que o seu impacto social medraba, os hábitos e o propio medio foron mudando e consolidando un cambio social no que os títulos comezaron a ser gozados no eido doméstico. Os salóns e posteriormente as habitacións dos foagares normalizaron un ambiente lúdico, vencellando ocio e experimentación coa realidade familiar e social do momento.

As their social impact grew, habits and the environment itself changed and consolidated a social change in which titles began to be enjoyed in the domestic sphere. The living rooms and later the bedrooms of the households normalized a playful atmosphere, linking leisure and experimentation with the family and social reality of the moment.

As décadas dos 80 e os 90 constitúen un periodo crucial na historia dos videoxogos, con enormes transformacións culturais e tecnolóxicas presentes na infancia e na memoria de millóns de xogadores.

The 80s and 90s constitute a crucial period in the history of video games, with enormous cultural and technological transformations present in the childhood and memories of millions of players.

Like other parts of the world, living rooms and eventually bedrooms became spaces where video games grew familiar, naturalized and normalized within everyday habits of play. Habitación Da Memoria is MUVi’s attempt to re-present a domestic scene from the past to its visitors.

Such rooms, what curatorial parlance bills as a “period room,” are staged interior spaces constructed to showcase historical decoration, design, lifestyle, and tastes. They are incredibly common in video game museums. Be it the West v. Soviet Bloc interiors during the Cold War, or a living room setting expressive of when video games first muscled into the home and onto the world’s coffee tables, or an installation of an independent video game store recreated to show the economic slump of the US game industry at the microlevel of retail. Whether it’s in these contexts or recreations of 17^th or 18^th century US or European stately interiors, period rooms often time-capsule a past to immerse visitors in distinct historical moments. They create stories about the past through assemblages of objects that reflect the specific era showcased.

My bewilderment from being unexpectedly stumbling into so much stuff is accompanied by the nagging feeling that I’ve encountered something like this before. I don’t mean this specific room. Or the time period recreated at MUVI that I lived through. Or even yet another period room in yet another video game museum, a common enough occurrence in my travels. No, I feel like I’ve been absorbed by a fertile, dense space elsewhere—in a story about a realer-than-real exhibit of the past.

I’ve long been a reader of science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. His short story, “The Preservation Machine,” inspired my book, Game After which led to this project you’re reading about right now. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was an adaptation of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The first film that I saw with a girlfriend, later to become my partner in passion, was Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut in 1992. We inevitably named our son “Deckard” after the story’s protagonist. And he likes to remind us that we named him after a male lead who shoots an unarmed female replicant in the back. I guess that parent of the year award went elsewhere.

Habitación Da Memoria unlocked a forgotten memory of another short story by Dick titled, “Exhibit Piece.”

Amid the arresting bedroom scene, I recall how an aggrieved co-worker ridicules George Miller, an “academician,” who in Dick’s short story constructs a perfect replica of a past age. Miller specializes in the mid-20^th century, like MUVi specializes in the late 20^th century. He loves his work so much that he adopts the mannerism, speech, and even the appearance of an “American businessman of the Eisenhower era” much to the scorn and suspicion of Controller Fleming, a governmental bureaucratic also employed at the History Agency.

Miller develops an “absolutely accurate” reproduction of a three-bedroom California ranch-style suburban home, complete with a sparkling green lawn, pleasing flowerbed, and shiny, new 1954 Buick in the driveway. The interior boasts its own accuracies. A modern sofa, an easy chair, wine-colored carpets, a copper ashtray, assorted magazines on a boomerang modern coffee table, and a chrome and Formica breakfast table.

Dick’s story adds a fantastic twist to an already convincing scene.

One morning, when settled into his desk to research, Miller hears a noise – the sound of laughter – deep inside his version of a period room (well, his is an entire house). Curious, he ventures into his exhibit to discover two teenage boys and a “handsome late thirtyish” woman. An aroma of bacon and hot coffee waft around the breakfast table. To Miller’s astonishment, the boys are his, the stylish woman, his wife. All three are enjoying breakfast together waiting for him to arrive…an improbable husband, a fantastical father whose presence adds further accuracy to his exhibition. Miller’s a “piece” in an exhibit to riff off Dick’s title.

The History Agency exhibit Miller painstakingly constructed becomes his new reality. Incredibly, he’s the architect of his own desire.

When inside his exhibit talking to his “family” he is living in mid-20^th century America, outside he’s back in the 22^nd century: a time-period that Dick depicts as an authoritarian world where children don’t cohabitate with their biological parents and marriage is not permitted. Unlike Miller’s present, he finds his constructed past preferable. The exhibit in Miller’s estimation has, somehow, become a “time-gate” between these two periods of time. When Fleming and History Agency Director Carnap demand that Miller come out of the exhibit, he refuses, preferring to live his life 200 years in the past, or in his own reconstruction of that past. Even threats by Carnap that they’ll demolish the exhibit fail to deter Miller. He vehemently believes that the exhibit is only a “bridge.” He’s traveled beyond the physical confines of his reconstruction.

Dick briefly allows us to believe that Miller bests Director Carnap when the story’s protagonist returns “home.” Expertly researched exhibition props now provide a familiar intimacy with Miller sitting cozily in his easy chair, slippers on his feet, and an “ice cold can of beer” in hand. The next day his morning newspaper displays the less than heartwarming headline, “Russia Reveals Cobalt Bomb Total World Destruction Ahead.” So long slippers. That Bermuda grass won’t be green much longer.

As a fellow “academician,” Miller’s refuge in his life’s work resonates. I too feel the tug of the past when visiting museums. Each artifact is like a little time-gate transporting me back to when placing a quarter on an Asteroids coin-op machine called “next game” and Blondie ruled.

MUVi’s Habitación Da Memoria offered a different sensation removed from the pangs of nostalgia. The answer to my dismay resides less in the past then within the stuff staring at me in the present.

Perhaps noticing that I’ve grown a little quiet, reflecting on what I remembered from Dick’s story, my guides’ eagerness to discuss my reaction to the swathes of stuff shocked me out of my introspection. We enthusiastically started speaking over one another, much as I imagined large clumps of mussels draped on ropes in Vigo’s estuaries.

 

“See that old VCR? That was used in my family’s house,” Galo shared.

Not easy to pick out given the rooms jam-packed contents, I thought.

“Ah, now I see it,” I responded.

A stack of videocassettes rests on top of the vintage machine, providing a lived-with, cluttery effect of VCR ownership. The sight of those rigid plastic cases splayed near the machine once signaled “movie night,” like a ticket torn by a uniformed cinema usher.

Above sits a Sega Genesis connected to a cathode-tube television. Its controller connected by a cord, dangling onto the VCR in an untidy manner as if someone just hastily placed it there, vanished when we walked in.

A Toshiba boombox crowds nearby on the floor. I couldn’t detect the cassette tape queued up, ready at the push of a little plastic silver button to soundtrack the playing of Sonic the Hedgehog.

A Casio keyboard synthesizer takes its rightful place at the foot of the bed cum studio lab. Oh, how I tried to play Tubeway Army’s “Down in the Park” and Japan’s “Life in Tokyo” on mine in my bedroom.

“All the games that you see came from the patron’s collections,” another voice informed. MUVi employs seven staff members, patrons who donate their items to the memory room. There are a lot of games in this room. Handheld devices like the Atari Lynx rests upon a neat row of Sesame Street children’s books. A Sega Game Gear becomes a paperweight atop a pile of magazines. A Gakken Super Cobra enjoys a playdate with assorted action figures. Others handheld games that I don’t recognize fill in the nooks and crannies of the bedroom’s shelving mosaics.

A xenomorph toy figure from Alien, a DeLorean from Back to the Future, He-Man, Ninja Turtles offer even more specimens to enrich the exhibit’s recreated time period.

The bedroom is not entirely given over to entertainment. An Amstrad ALT-3865 X “luggable” laptop computer shares a workspace surface with Spanish language dictionaries, assorted computer magazines, pencils, pens, paper, and a mandatory Walkman for late night study sessions. The bedroom serves many purposes for its imagined inhabitant, and the curated exhibit reveals – revels in – such intimate details.

I’m particularly drawn to the sheer number of magazines and books lining shelves and stacked on the desk. Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks rest alongside The Adventures of Tintin comics.

“The magazines?” I ask. “Are these also from patrons?”

“Yes. We’ve kept these for years. Now they are part of this exhibit,” Galo clarifies.

Select pages from magazines have been removed, tacked onto bedroom walls. The likes of Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, no doubt freed from horror film magazines share pin-up space near Michael Jackson and Madonna. Video game ads and pictures of basketball and football players join the clippings montage. Posters affixed to the middle of magazines – a onetime motivator to purchase an issue – have been carefully pried from their staples so that Indiana Jones, Luke and Yoda in training from The Empire Strikes Back, Ripley of Aliens, even B-Movie goddess Sybil Danning and a promotional image of the television series V adorn these walls in defiance of gallery solemness.

 

This stuff compels me to ask.

“Is Habitación Da Memoria presented as a typical bedroom in Vigo, or one in the broader Pontevedra province?”

I quickly follow-up with, “Whose memories are reflected in this room?”

After being translated into Galician for the benefit of all present, and conversation among the group, the answer to my first question emerges, “no.” Spain’s economic strife of the early 1980s would’ve made this room “lavish,” the space only a few upper middle class families could’ve afforded for their children—kids with their own televisions, VCRs, personal computers, multiple gaming systems, multiple handheld games, boomboxes and hi-fi systems.

This room, I’m told by Galo, is “an ideal room,” not a reality for many kids growing up in Pontevedra during the 1980s. It’s a composite exhibit, collectively composed by all team member’s personal possessions– even stuff from their parents, like the VCR that was originally shared in the family room not in the isolation of a bedroom.

My second question is answered here as well. The memory expressed in this “ideal room” is of a collective nature, not singular. Multi-sourced. Fictional not accurate portrayal. It is no one’s room. But there is enough stuff assembled for visitors to gain a semblance of their own past, reconnect with their own personal experiences of the era.

This revelation captures the sensation that’s accompanied me when hesitantly stepping into the Habitación Da Memoria and, perhaps, why Dick’s “Exhibit Piece” popped back into my mind.

I’ve repeatedly described the period room’s contents as stuff. It’s a fabulously nebulous word, often used to account for a large volume, or a collection of disparate things. MUVi’s stuff in Habitación Da Memoria isn’t erratic, just random things from the 1980s compiled into a room. A coherent ensemble emerges, a comprehensible story shown in fragments. None of this stuff is surrogates or copies of vintage objects but the actual things lived with, handled, looked at, listened to and played with by patrons. Their traces of memory manifest in a dangling wire, a pin-holed poster.

Shared with visitors, all these different media – magazines, books, posters, televisions, boom boxes, synthesizers, portable computers, a Walkman, and, of course, video games – physically shaped an intimacy with technology in the most personal room in a house, the bedroom, reconstructed at MUVi to open an entire universe of experiences.

Museums are good at defamiliarizing objects. An exhibited object removes proximity, places an object out of reach. Cut off, we experience a different relationship with it. A re-created bedroom – in a museum – re-establishes proximity, reinjects intimacy. The scene is familiar even if we didn’t own that same Casio or read Tintin. How the room is arranged suggests less museum objects like those we observed, sequestered outside the “memory room,” than things lived with, played, used, and aged. Perhaps a firm membrane is needed – a room set off from more recognizable and anticipated curatorial conventions where we “look” not “touch” – to remind, or introduce to younger visitors, the physical, tactile, encounters with media.

In this room an imagined teenager lived with media. Lived through media. Video games – despite the museum surrounding this embedded period room – merge into this cohesive whole. Video games, after all, are seldom played in isolation from other forms of media then and today alike. They are part of an entire idiosyncratic network of stuff comingling together. Configured as an ensemble of the past, accuracy matters less than it did for Miller’s exhibit. This time-gate may be compiled from relics of the past, but it transports us only to the present.

Here, at MUVi, in December 2024, when I visited, I was reminded not just of my stuff from the past, a cheesy flashback high-pitched to the inflection of, “like, SOOOOO, totally awesome 80s,” but what people did with and to that stuff. Distant practices forgotten, returned, re-presented.

Media today consolidate, converge, squeeze difference onto the same screens compared to what once led separate clunky existences sprawled across bedroom floors. That’s why I felt overwhelmed. I’d forgotten just how discreet media once were.

The clutter of stacked videocassette boxes on a VCR long retired in the age of digital streaming.

Enormous boomboxes a tripping hazard in the era of tiny Beats Studio Pros that hide slyly between sofa cushions.

Synthesizers, a center piece of the bedroom, shrunk to digital audio workstation software apps.

Mounds of paperback books? Storage space on 32G Kindles.

Piles of magazines on shelves? Subscription services with unlimited access across all digital devices.

Posters tacked on walls? Visual effects on social media profiles, or fruit emojis ripe with sexual connotation.

Amidst the clutter, I don’t just see obsolete devices or “dead-tech,” or feel nostalgic about a Sybil Danning poster (though, occasionally I still longingly recall her Valkyrie outfit from the schlocky Battle Beyond the Stars). I’m shown what young people did with this stuff and, perhaps, how similar practices of curating a user space extend to today’s cultural practices with digital devices.

Our intimacy, where teenagers once constructed themselves, is no longer confined to bedrooms, or to the dream that a poster carefully affixed near a bed whispered in deep slumber. Personalizing boring bedroom walls with posters carefully detached from magazines, expressed our “likes,” as do curated content feeds today. Future period rooms (what a glorious contradiction!) will collect, arrange, and exhibit next-gen relics equally estranged from those teens today who never pushed a tack into a wall.

Unlike Miller, I stepped out of this museum’s memory room. It offers no refuge.

I’m as committed as my fellow academician, only my stomach grumbles. I want to sample the Port of Vigo’s froitos do mar before another plane whisks me on my way, hopefully with my carry-on safely stowed above. I say my good-byes to the MUVi team. They’ll turn up in other stories.

My journey back across the bay, catching the bateas fleet at dusk, allows me to take in Habitación Da Memoria’s gesture: the history of games presented in museums isn’t just collecting and exhibiting stuff but a meaningful rapprochement between how people experience and live with games right down to the bedsheets.

The post Museum Games #3 Rapprochement na Habitación da Memoria appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

What Museums Do: Versions

The certificate, in other words, answers the wrong question — but it isn’t alone in that. Every museum holding these materials has to decide what question it’s trying to answer, and that’s where Latour and Lowe become most useful.

They build toward this argument through a more elaborate example: Veronese’s Nozze di Cana, the original of which hangs in the Louvre, displaced from the Venetian refectory for which it was painted by Napoleon’s armies in 1797. When Factum Arte produced a high-resolution facsimile and returned it to Palladio’s refectory on the island of San Giorgio in Venice, something unexpected happened: the copy, restored to its original context — correct lighting, height, architectural relationship — felt more faithful to the painting’s meaning than the original in Paris. The aura, Latour and Lowe argue, had migrated. Their point is not that copies are as good as originals, but that “originality” is not a fixed property of a single object — it is distributed across the whole trajectory of a work’s life, and it can accumulate in unexpected places.

The most clarifying moment in their essay, however, is a more modest analogy: the performance of King Lear. No one walks into a production and asks whether this is the real King Lear, faithfully reproducing some ur-performance that Shakespeare himself staged and that all subsequent versions must answer to. No one asks if this is the original. What audiences ask is whether it is well or badly performed. Each production is a segment in a long trajectory, judged on its own terms as a version, not measured against an inaccessible original. And crucially, a genuinely great production can add something to the work — finding dimensions in it that earlier versions left dormant — making the original richer rather than merely reproducing it.

This is the situation I find myself in, moving from museum to museum. The Alamogordo event is not available in any original form — there is no first performance to which every museum staging must answer, no single excavation any visitor could have witnessed in full. What there were instead, even at the moment of the dig itself, were a rumor stretching back decades, a documentary crew shaping what was filmed, an archaeological team working under time and sandstorm, and a crowd of hundreds each experiencing a different slice of the same Saturday. What is available now are stagings: each institution’s specific choices about what to foreground, what to leave out, what objects to gather, what narratives to build around them. The question I find myself asking in each gallery is not whether the cartridges are authentic (the certificates say they are) but whether this staging does justice to the complexity of what happened. Is it well or badly staged?

Latour and Lowe offer a second way to navigate the same conundrum, one I introduced earlier: the trajectory. Recall, instead of asking whether any given object is an original or a copy, they propose attending to the whole trajectory — the river and all its tributaries. The same logic applies to the Alamogordo event: it is not a fixed thing that museums either faithfully stage or distort. It is an ongoing accumulation of everything that has fed into and followed from the rumor, the excavation, and their long institutional afterlife. Each staging draws on a particular point in that river and works with what it can carry. The question is what it does with what it has.

There is one further dimension the Shakespeare analogy captures that the Veronese argument does not: the Alamogordo excavation was always partly theatrical. The crowd in the desert, the documentary crew, archaeology as spectacle, a digger excavating a thirty-five-foot pit for an audience of hundreds — it was already a performance before any museum staged it. The museums are, in this sense, reviving something that was conceived for an audience from the start. What they are arguing about, whether they know it or not, is how to direct the second act.

Göteborg. “A World of Games” at Världskulturmuseet ran from April 2023 through May 2026 and brought together more than 100 games spanning 4,000 years, from an ancient Egyptian game board called Men through Japanese karuta, Indian Ganjifa cards, chess pieces from China, role-playing games, LARP, arcade machines, and e-sports. The Atari burial sits inside all of that. The Alamogordo cartridges — dirty, cracked, excavated from a New Mexico landfill — share an exhibition with objects that predate them by millennia, from cultures that never heard of Atari and had no stake in the 1983 crash. The juxtaposition is quietly extraordinary: the burial that I once cynically questioned whether anyone should care about appears here as a chapter in the deep history of human play, alongside game boards from ancient Egypt whose rules have been entirely forgotten. Whatever the burial is, Världskulturmuseet has decided it belongs in that company. I stood there longer than the placard warranted.

My photographs appear in the display, credited. Reinhard appears on video. The version Göteborg produces is intellectually ambitious. It reaches not for game industry history but for something closer to anthropology, a long view of play that makes the Atari crash look less like a business story and more like one more episode in the very long history of games appearing, circulating, and disappearing. What it occasionally risks is absorbing the specificity of the event into a frame so broad that the strangeness of the burial itself — the legend, the confirmation, the crowd in the desert — can recede behind the larger argument. That risk seems worth taking. Few institutions have placed the Alamogordo materials in a context that reframes them so thoroughly — here they are not industry artifacts or collector’s items but participants in a conversation about human play that began long before electronics existed.

There is also something the Göteborg display cannot fully account for: the fact that I am standing in it. Latour and Lowe write about the “migration of the aura” — the way auratic presence can detach from one version of a work and reattach to another. Something like this happens when a researcher’s documentary images migrate from the conditions of their making into institutional life. The photographs were made as records on a tempestuous April day in New Mexico. They now function as evidence, as atmosphere, as wall panels in an exhibition about 4,000 years of games. They are doing work I did not assign them, in a context I could not have anticipated.

Rome. GAMM has assembled a particularly expansive and inventive staging of the Alamogordo event. The display cases alone contain multitudes: recovered cartridges (Warlords, Star Raiders, Missile Command, Asteroids) in various states of degradation; trays of actual Alamogordo soil with cartridge fragments still embedded in it; two City of Alamogordo Certificates of Authenticity mounted at the top of the cases like institutional crowns; and the September 1983 newspaper article “Dump here utilized,” by M.E. McQuiddy in the Alamogordo Daily News — the contemporaneous documentation of the burial, published before it had passed into game history.

My photographs appear on screens that walk visitors through details of the excavation; others, from the original 1983 dump — the empty desert site, the machinery at work, workers pouring concrete to prevent theft — are placed throughout the display cases. Reinhard appears on a large overhead screen in a video produced specifically for the museum, identified as being from the Game Museum of Rome Archive.

 

What stopped me entirely were the coin-op cabinets. GAMM has produced three custom arcade machines, branded “E.T. The Fall,” running playable versions of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Pac-Man, and Q*bert on Atari 2600 hardware. The cabinet artwork merges the excavation aesthetic with classic arcade design: sandy desert tones, distressed lettering, the look of something dug up and repurposed. Visitors can play E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial — the game whose burial they have just been reading about — on a cabinet that commemorates its interment. Who wouldn’t want to play the very game whose failure they’re reading about? The game is simultaneously the object of study and the thing you play, the artifact and the experience. GAMM understood that the burial was not just a story about objects but about games, and that the most direct way to display a game is to let people play it.

 

The sheer volume of material GAMM has gathered, and the inventiveness with which it has been deployed, produces a staging of Alamogordo that is dense and strange. In the terms Latour and Lowe borrow from Shakespeare: it is a production that throws everything at the play, and the play holds up.

Cambridge. The Cambridge Computer Centre places the Alamogordo materials within a “Gaming Zone” that frames video games in the context of British computing history and general game history — the E.T. panel sits adjacent to one on Colossal Cave as a precursor to interactive fiction, situating the burial within a longer history of what computers have made possible. The interpretive panel is headed “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial / The Worst Video Game of All Time?” and works through the film, Howard Scott Warshaw’s six-week development deadline, the crash, and the burial, concluding that the 728,000 games buried at Alamogordo marked “the symbolic end of Atari as a video game industry giant.” It also makes space for Warshaw himself, quoting him directly: “It’s awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex.” Even the man blamed for ending an industry gets a punchline.

 

The panel’s built-in touchscreen offers a menu of remarkable range: the E.T. film trailer, the Atari: Game Over documentary trailer, KOB Albuquerque News coverage of the excavation, a dedicated excavation video — and the option to play E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial itself. The regional New Mexico television footage is the detail that arrests me: the most local and least mediated documentation of the event, made available alongside the Microsoft-produced documentary in the same interface. At Cambridge, the burial is visible simultaneously as regional news story, corporate media event, and playable game — and the designer held responsible for it gets to complicate his own reputation in his own words. Cambridge doesn’t resolve the event into a single argument. It puts its diverse components in the same touchscreen menu and lets the visitor sort them out. I spent longer at that touchscreen than I’d like to admit.

Sheffield. The National Video Game Museum holds its Alamogordo materials within a display case that places E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in the company of Football Manager, Fantasy Games, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Batman — a survey of gaming history in which the burial appears as one chapter among many rather than a singular event deserving its own shrine. The label reads simply “The E.T. Incident” and gives the essential facts in a few sentences: Warshaw’s absurdly short development deadline, the poor sales, the fourteen trucks dumped at Alamogordo. It is an economical treatment of the event, and in that economy there is a kind of confidence — this is game history, it belongs here, it does not require special pleading.

 

The cartridge and manual on display are not excavated materials. There is no Certificate of Authenticity, no Alamogordo dirt, no deformed game cartridge. Sheffield represents the burial through a standard retail copy of the game. This is a curatorial decision that turns out to matter considerably, because of what else is in the case. The E.T. manual is inscribed by Howard Scott Warshaw himself — “For Game City & Notgames / The National Videogame Arcade” — with his signature. Sheffield holds a copy of the game signed by its maker, donated directly to the museum. The Certificate of Authenticity authenticated the cartridges’ passage through the earth’s crust. Warshaw’s inscription authenticates something different: the game’s passage through his hands, his own recognition that what he produced belongs in a collection. It is a different segment of the trajectory entirely — not the burial but the making, the designer’s acknowledgment of the museum as a worthy custodian. The dirt on the excavated cartridges speaks to what happened in 1983. Warshaw’s signature speaks to what the game has become since.

Málaga. The OXO Museum has made an architecturally distinctive display decision: a freestanding column in which the Alamogordo materials are stacked vertically, ascending in order of institutional weight. At the base, a bilingual panel on the 1983 crash. Above it, a playable screen running E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Above that, a glass vitrine with purple underlighting containing an excavated Vanguard cartridge — degraded, still bearing its red label, the dirt of New Mexico implicit in its condition. And at the very top, presiding over everything below it, the City of Alamogordo Certificate of Authenticity, framed and elevated like a reliquary card. I didn’t expect to genuflect at a museum display in Málaga, but here we are. The physical hierarchy says something the other institutions leave implicit: the certificate is not supplementary documentation, it is the crown of the display.

 

The certificate itself rewards close attention. It authenticates a Vanguard cartridge, not E.T. — a reminder that the burial encompassed far more than E.T., whatever popular memory had reduced it to. It bears three signatures: Mayor Susie Galea of Alamogordo, Joseph R. Lewandowski as Researcher/Organizer, and Howard Scott Warshaw, signed as Atari Game Engineer. Warshaw co-authenticating the recovered objects is something I keep turning over. The designer whose game became the symbol of the crash, signing certificates that verify the objects of that crash, for museums around the world. His signature on the Sheffield manual speaks to the game’s making. His signature on the Málaga certificate speaks to its burial and recovery. The same hand, two entirely different segments of the trajectory.

The bilingual panel is also worth noting for how it frames the crash within global game history: the American collapse of 1983, it explains, coincided with a “change of scenery” in which the video game revolution continued in Europe through 8-bit microcomputers and in Japan through consoles like the Famicom. The burial was an American ending that was also a global beginning. Málaga, a Spanish museum, makes that point explicitly — and says so on the wall.

Shanghai. The Video Game Museum of CADPA stages a translation of its own, across an ocean and into a country that had no direct stake in the 1983 crash whatsoever. A panel headed “The Great Atari Crash” narrates the collapse in economic terms: the American home video game market peaked at $3.2 billion in 1983 and fell to approximately $100 million by 1985, the causes being overproduction, market saturation, and Atari’s loss of control over third-party developers. Illustrating the panel is one of my photographs: cartridges in the Alamogordo dirt, a Centipede box clearly visible among the debris — used without credit, which I mention only in passing and without grievance; photographs travel, and this one has clearly traveled well. What strikes me more is what the panel’s existence means. China did not experience the 1983 crash. The Atari 2600 was not a presence in Chinese homes. The burial in New Mexico is not part of any living memory here. And yet CADPA, whose ambitions include participation in the global conversation on video game museums, treats the Alamogordo materials as significant enough to document. The burial has become a chapter in world game history, not just US game history. I think of my wife’s response — museums are telling you that the stuff is important — and find it confirmed in the last place I might have expected. My cynicism, it turns out, was parochial.

 

What the Versions Leave Out

Across these institutions, the question that Latour and Lowe arm me against keeps reasserting itself: is this the real thing? The Certificate of Authenticity raises it. The presence of the documentary raises it. The fact that millions of identical cartridges exist raises it. Visitors arrive with it already formed.

The question the objects actually reward is different, however. It is the question of what each staging of Alamogordo, each museum’s specific choices about framing, selection, supplementation, and context, does with the complexity of the event. The cartridges are segments in a trajectory that includes a thirty-year rumor, a series of critical articles, an archaeological excavation organized by a film company, a municipal certificate of authenticity, a commercial marketplace, a hard hat in the Henry Ford, and cultural responses the museums have yet to reckon with: a bootleg toy maker – Special Ed Toys – whose “$999,999.99 or best offer” packaging does sharper critical work on the eBay situation than anything the City of Alamogordo produced, and a French artist, Florent Deloison, who in 2023 made an actual Atari 2600 game in which the player buries E.T. cartridges in the New Mexico desert — the machine burying itself, running on the hardware whose failure prompted the burial. Neither appears in any museum display I have visited. The trajectory keeps moving. The display cases do not.

What I find most instructive, looking across these institutions, is that the stagings sitting least comfortably with me are not the ones that do the least. They are the ones that claim the most while omitting what is genuinely strange about the event. The Alamogordo excavation was not a simple archaeological recovery. It was a media event organized by a corporation, created by a documentary crew, negotiated through municipal government, certified by bureaucratic apparatus, monetized through eBay, and distributed to institutions through a commercial marketplace that museums had to enter as bidders. That is a complicated trajectory. The stagings that acknowledge the complication — that let the strangeness show — seem to me the better ones in Latour and Lowe’s sense: more fecund, more generative, more faithful to what happened.

A Note on Returning

I want to return to the likes of GAMM and OXO, because I have not finished with what I experienced there. Latour and Lowe describe a visitor who enters the Salle de la Joconde and experiences a “terrible cognitive dissonance” on encountering the Veronese in a context entirely wrong for it — wrong lighting, height, relationship to the architectural space for which it was made. The version she saw in Venice, the facsimile in Palladio’s refectory, had been more faithful to the original’s meaning than the original in Paris. The aura had migrated.

I do not want to over claim something similar for my own experience in Göteborg or GAMM. But there is a version of the Alamogordo story that lives in the photographs in those museums — in the specific choices I made about angle and proximity and moment, made by someone who had been writing about this event for a decade before it happened, who came on his own dime, who was there as a historian rather than as a spectator — that is not fully available anywhere else. Not in the documentary, not in the text panels that accompany the cartridges in any of these museums. To find those photographs credited with my name, doing work I did not assign them, is to encounter a version of myself as a segment in a trajectory I am still in the middle of.

I want to keep going back to these places. What I know from the accumulation of these visits is that no single institution has figured out what to do with objects that are simultaneously archaeological, industrial, cultural-historical, legendary, commercially distributed, satirized, and artistically reanimated. Each one has solved part of the problem and deferred the rest. Latour and Lowe note that the Veronese facsimile in Venice paradoxically triggered plans for a new restoration of the original refectory — “a facsimile of a heavily restored original, now in a new location, was causing new elements to be added to an original in its original location that is in part a facsimile of itself. Originality once seemed so simple.” The Alamogordo situation is less elegant but no less recursive: each segment of the trajectory kept generating the next, the rumor begetting the excavation, the excavation begetting its own afterlife, on and on, with no sign of arriving anywhere final. The trajectory is still open. The questions the objects raise do not resolve. I still owe that camera an apology, and I am still working out what I saw — neither debt seems close to settled.

The post Versions of a Burial: The Atari Landfill Excavation in Museums, Part 2 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

There is something quietly vertiginous about walking through an exhibition and finding yourself already inside it. Not a self you remember putting there, but a self distributed across objects, images, words; a self that arrived in the museum before you did, and which now looks back at you from behind glass.

This happened to me at Göteborg’s Världskulturmuseet, where the exhibition “A World of Games” includes a display dedicated to the excavation of the Atari landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The photographs shown in that display are mine. My name appears alongside them as do the names of the team of archaeologists that I worked with. Nearby, video interviews with Andrew Reinhard — the archaeologist who led the excavation — play on a monitor. I stood in that gallery for some time, in a museum I had traveled to for reasons only partly connected to this material, trying to decide what I was experiencing. Neither pride, nor estrangement accurately describes the way I feel. The feeling was uncanny in the precise sense: familiar and foreign at once. I just stood there.

I have been thinking about that moment ever since, and about the other moments like it: standing before display cases in Rome, Sheffield, Málaga, Cambridge, and Shanghai, looking at what each museum had gathered to tell this story, trying to understand what the museums are doing with it, what questions the objects raise in their new institutional lives.

On these trips I would text my wife with some version of the same line: “more dig materials at _______.” And I would typically share how flummoxed I was at seeing such attention devoted to the recovered materials at museums the world over. The Atari Burial — as the disposal of the company’s products has come to be known — is even an exhibit at the Video Game Museum of CADPA in Shanghai. My perplexity, I told her, resided in my own skepticism: is this stuff really that important? I mean, sure, we unearthed a myth, hushed the rumors, quelled a legend, and unveiled all that infamous trash to major international media outlets. But…are all the recovered materials – including dirt from the actual pit – really that important to the history of games for museums to devote time, money, energy, and space to display smelly garbage to their visitors as historical artifacts? My wife’s response was blunt, and rather sobering: museums are telling you that the stuff is important. I stood corrected. It seemed best, on reflection, to cast off my skepticism and work to understand what work this stuff is doing in a museum.

 

This installment is my attempt at that understanding, conducted in dialogue with a framework that has long shaped my thinking about video games in museums: Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe’s 2010 essay “The Migration of the Aura, or How to Explore the Original Through Its Facsimiles,” published in Switching Codes (University of Chicago Press). Like the physical appearance of the excavated game cartridges themselves — distorted, smashed, eroded — I will not arrive at tidy conclusions. It is not the cracks in the plastic or the frayed packaging themselves that teach me anything; it is how museums curate that damage, what they choose to make of it, that becomes the object lesson.

Before the Ground Opened

I should establish my position in this story. I am not a neutral observer of the Alamogordo story. I am, in a modest but real sense, one of its authors, and the earliest critical one. My camera never fully recovered from all that sand.

In 2004, I published “Concrete and Clay: The Life and Afterlife of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600” in the journal Design and Culture, an article that took seriously what was then treated primarily as an industry fable: the claim that Atari, facing catastrophic losses after the collapse of the home console market in 1983, had buried millions of unsold cartridges — including unsold quantities of the notorious E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game — in a municipal landfill in southeastern New Mexico[i]. The story had circulated for two decades by then and had acquired in the telling all the features of urban legend: dramatic scale, corporate denial, with a location simply too good to be true — in the same state as Area 51 and the test site for the US’s first nuclear weapon. The persistent legend gave the industry crash a burial site. It made the failure literal, interred. I took it seriously as a cultural object regardless of whether it was literally true, because the rumor was doing real work in how game history was being made and remembered. I then devoted an entire chapter to the burial in Game After (MIT Press, 2014). I wrote about my images of Atari’s trash in Cabinet. I wrote about the culture of the excavation with game studies colleagues in Reconstruction. The team of archaeologists and I wrote about it in The Atlantic. Each venue asked something different of the material and of me, and each piece forced me to understand more precisely what I thought the legend meant. Now having it shown back to me at museums prompts even more considerations.

Latour and Lowe offer a concept I want to borrow here: the trajectory. Rather than asking whether any given object is an original or a copy — a question they argue is almost always the wrong one — they propose attending to the whole “catchment area” of a work: the river and all its tributaries, sources, and deltas. “A given work of art,” they write, “should be compared not to any isolated locus but to a river’s catchment, complete with its estuaries, its many tributaries, its dramatic rapids, its many meandering turns and its several hidden sources.” The Alamogordo story, thought through this lens, does not begin with the burial in 1983 or the excavation in 2014 — though for the locals who picked through the landfill at the time, there was no legend to wait for; they had the cartridges in hand. For everyone else, the story begins somewhere in the accumulation of rumors that circulated through game culture in the years between, before anyone put a shovel back in the ground. “Concrete and Clay” was a segment in that trajectory. So was every version of the story that preceded it, and every museum display and ongoing discourse that has followed.

What I want to hold onto, for now, is the implication that my decade of writing about the Alamogordo burial before the excavation took place was not merely prologue. It was part of the trajectory — part of what made the dig legible as a cultural event rather than a municipal curiosity. The rumor needed critical attention before it needed archaeological confirmation.

Going Underground

The excavation took place in April 2014. The city of Alamogordo granted permission for a dig organized by Fuel Entertainment, with documentary filmmaker Zak Penn present and a camera crew in tow — the resulting film, Atari: Game Over, was produced by the entertainment arm of Microsoft’s Xbox, and I appear in it. Penn had interviewed me in New York and invited me to Alamogordo; I came on my own dime. No one was flying me anywhere to discuss a thirty-year-old rumor about garbage. My role at the site was as historian and documentary photographer, a position that shaped how I moved through the event and what I paid attention to.

The cartridges themselves have stayed with me, and I have written about them at length elsewhere. But what I remember just as vividly is the crowd. In a piece I later co-wrote with Judd Ethan Ruggill, Ken S. McAllister, and Carly A. Kocurek for the journal Reconstruction, we noted that people had driven for days to be there — one man told a camera crew he had come twenty-eight hours straight from Oregon, and when asked what he would do if the dig came up empty, replied gravely, “That would be bad.” Others arrived by Greyhound bus and then by taxi from town, which must have made for one of the stranger fares the driver had ever logged. The line to get in stretched for hundreds of people by the time the gates opened, long enough that families set up folding chairs and sent runners to the McDonald’s down the road. There were food trucks — one of them, painted lime green, advertised itself with the tagline “Order Some Disorder” — and a dig-side arcade improvised from a folding table, two old television sets, and a generator humming against the wind. People bought souvenir canteens printed with the excavation’s coordinates and an 8-bit foam sprite of E.T. We signed legally binding releases before we were allowed anywhere near the pit. It had, in other words, all the trappings of a small, temporary community organized around the possibility that a rumor might turn out to be true. We were all there to watch a story become true.

When the first cartridges appeared — dirty, degraded, some smashed, some of them still sealed in blister packs — the crowd reacted with a sound I am still not sure how to describe. It was not just a rousing cheer but something more like release, like the exhaling of a story that had been held thirty years too long. I took photographs throughout. I was thinking, at that moment, primarily about documentation — and about advocating that museums like The Strong National Museum of Play, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives receive whatever we recovered, if anything was there at all. I was not thinking about Göteborg, or Rome, or Sheffield. I was not thinking about what it would feel like, years later, to stand in a museum and find my images in an exhibit.

The cartridges that came up were not all E.T. The excavation recovered a wide variety of titles — the landfill was not simply an E.T. graveyard, despite what the legend had insisted. The condition of the materials varied considerably. Many were intact enough to be identified but showed clear signs of wear from having been jumbled with other trash underground in a sealed landfill — though at least one cartridge, astonishingly, booted up without trouble when plugged into an Atari 2600 on site. They were, in the most precise sense, excavated objects. Trash cum archaeological objects. They had been in the ground and now they were above ground.

Then they entered another kind of ground: the e-commerce market of eBay.

The Certificate of Authenticity Problem

Here is something that does not appear in the documentary, and that I find myself thinking about every time I stand in front of an Atari burial display at a museum: the City of Alamogordo issued official Certificates of Authenticity to accompany the recovered cartridges. These certificates were designed to distinguish cartridges genuinely recovered from the landfill from the millions of identical cartridges that have been circulating since their production in the 1970s and 80s. That is a reasonable problem to solve: without some authentication mechanism, a dirty E.T. cartridge pulled from a collector’s shelf is visually indistinguishable from one that spent thirty years underground (the latter will just smell worse).

 

The certificates were issued to accompany cartridges sold on eBay. Each listing came with a property tag, the certificate itself, and a pamphlet containing photographs from both the original 1983 dump and the 2014 dig, an authentication package of surprising elaborateness, assembled for a commercial marketplace. Which means that the museums now holding these objects — the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, OXO in Málaga, GAMM in Rome, and others — had to acquire them by bidding against private collectors on eBay. I think about that a lot: a museum, sandwiched between bids, treating a dead company’s garbage like a contested estate sale.

 

This is worth pausing on. The document that confers institutional legitimacy on these objects was produced for a marketplace. Museums became one category of bidder among others. I picture a curator hunched over a laptop at 11 p.m., refreshing a listing.

The Henry Ford Museum received its materials differently: the Henry Ford came directly to the archaeology team. My hard hat from the dig is in the Henry Ford collection, alongside other excavation artifacts including actual dirt from the pit. The Henry Ford’s mandate is American industrial and technological history: its collections include the Rosa Parks bus, the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop, Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. My hard hat keeps unusual company. That a hard hat from the Alamogordo dig sits in that company is a version of this event that game-specific museums cannot produce, and it is the version that perhaps takes most seriously what the excavation was: a moment in American business and technology history, not just game history.

 

Back to the certificate. Latour and Lowe are useful here, though not in the way one might expect. They argue strenuously against the obsession with pinpointing originals, against the idea that the meaningful question is, “is this the real thing?” The Certificate of Authenticity performs exactly that obsession in bureaucratic form. It is a municipal government’s attempt to freeze the original/copy distinction — to say, officially, this cartridge is from the landfill, and this one is not — at precisely the moment when, as Latour and Lowe would have it, that is the wrong question. The more interesting question is what any given museum does with its version of the object once acquired. The certificate answers a question about provenance. It has nothing to say about meaning.

Still, I do not want to dismiss it entirely. The dirt on these cartridges matters. The wear matters. The time spent underground does as well. The specific history of burial and recovery matters, even if it cannot be read directly from the object without supplementation. The certificate is a clumsy instrument for preserving something Latour and Lowe would recognize as worth preserving: not the object’s claim to be original, but the specific trajectory that brought it here. A cartridge dug out of the Alamogordo dirt and a cartridge that has sat on a collector’s shelf since 1983 are materially the same object; what distinguishes them is everything that happened to each one in between. The problem is that the certificate enlists this distinction in service of a market rather than in service of understanding.

End of Part 1

[i] I did a follow-up piece for the USC journal, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, in 2006 that utilized the phrase “undead media” to address surviving coin-op arcade games. The landfill legend played a role in that article; namely via the account of the landfill shared in D.B. Weiss’s novel Lucky Wander Boy. The funny thing is that I just searched my essay in Vectors entitled, “Ms. Pac-Man: An Elegy for the Undead,” to see how to access it given that the journal was built in Flash. Here’s what Gemini shared: “The irony of the piece is that “Ms. Pac-Man: An Elegy for the Undead” has itself fallen victim to the exact digital obsolescence and “media death” that Raiford Guins wrote about. Because the Vectors Journal interface was built entirely on Adobe Flash, the original interactive format is now broken on modern browsers.” Bravo, Gemini, bravo.

The post Versions of a Burial: The Atari Landfill Excavation in Museums, Part 1 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Frisco feels new. Shiny and new. Always expanding, always under construction, always trying to ease the commute south to the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area with creature comforts like a downtown revitalization project, new parking garages, a training facility for the Dallas Cowboys and Toyota Stadium home to the MLS side, FC Dallas.

My journey to Tampere from Helsinki proved a little more exciting. To my sheer delight, trains in Finland offer an entire coach for pets! I missed my two Swedish Vallhunds, Abba and Pontus, which prompted me to spend two hours in a coach with seating areas that resemble cots. Dogs stretch out at greater leisure than humans who ride upright while their canine companion sprawl before a window view. Looking down the aisle, I spot dogs lying on the floor, sitting in seats, walking and wagging their tails in the aisle, and snoozing blissfully on their seats. Big dogs. Little dogs. Black dogs. White dogs. None in hats. None driving around in cars. If P.D. Eastman wrote about Finland, the title of his lovely book would be Train, Dog. Train!

Tampere is the regional capital of Pirkanmaa and the area’s cultural center. I swapped a coach full of canines for a museum full of those magical trolls indigenous to Finland, Moomin! My hotel was next door to Tampere’s Moomin Museum. Walking around the city after ages spent in the museum admiring Tove Jansson’s creations, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that the people of Tampere aren’t nicknamed “Little Mys” or “Snufkins” after the inhabitants of Moominvalley. Instead, Tampere’s industrial past earned its residents the nickname, “Manse,” due to the city being dubbed, the “Manchester of the North”. And like the city in the north of England, Tampere has its own version of black pudding known as, mustamakkara. I spied (and avoided) these blood-dark shiny skinned sausage at the Tampereen Kauppahalli. With architectural roots in the late 19^th century, it’s the largest market hall in Scandinavia.

One city enjoys an abundance of freshwater lakes; the other resides in “Tornado Alley.” One is regarded as the sauna capital of the world, the other feels like a sauna during long summer months.

Such differences and distance do not however preclude similarities. The Finnish Museum of Games and the National Videogame Museum are, I discovered, museums nested within other museums. They remind me of Matryoshka dolls, or “Russian Dolls,” as they are commonly called. Their charm resides in what the object-in-an-object reveals. An outer shell-like layer is opened and removed. Inside a smaller figure appears. The dolls decrease in size with each layer removed until the tiniest figure in the series cannot be opened. Unveiling ends not in any reduced hierarchy – from important to least important – but in the demonstration of correlated relations, forms, and meanings. Macro and micro scales are displayed as interdependent.

The Finnish Museum of Games lives inside Museokeskus Vapriikki. Located in a former factory building, the museum center is now home to a natural history museum, stone museum, the Finnish Hockey Museum, the Finnish Postal Museum, among other exhibition spaces.

The National Video Game Museum resides within the city of Frisco’s Discovery Center sharing space with TrainTopia, the Museum of the American Railroad; Sci-Tech, a hands-on, interactive science museum; and the Frisco Public Library.

Removing this layer of the Finnish Museum of Games reveals a museum devoted to the history of games within a specific, regional context: game development, industry, and the culture of game play within the Nordic country. Finland, after all, gave the world Angry Birds and Max Payne, and is currently home to over two-hundred game developer studios.

Removing this layer of the National Videogame Museum reveals a museum that offers its visitors a more general, non-regionally specific approach to the history of video games. Although its mission is not “the history of video games in the US,” it flirts with regional context: an appeal to place takes the form of a recreated teenager’s bedroom decorated with sports pendants for the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Rangers and a “Another Student for Reagan-Bush 84” sticker to affirm Texas’s longstanding “Red State” status to visitors—mixing a period of time, place, and politics with play.

Inside both museums, I walk through a variety of different exhibits. Tampere treats visitors to recreated bedroom/living room spaces, displays of games developed in Finland, a magnificent timeline of game consoles that reminds me of a “family tree,” and an arcade space. Displays on Finnish games include title cards, descriptions of the game’s significance in Finnish and English, interactive game play, and audio interviews with developers.

 

In Frisco, I pass through exhibits devoted to hardware timelines, 3^rd party software developers, in-game easter eggs, handhelds and portable games, PC gaming, video games translated into table-top games, an innovative temporary exhibit on representation of North American indigenous groups in games, and an arcade space. Title cards aren’t in Spanish. The museum was founded by three super-collectors of video games, and it shows: display cases are packed with game artifacts, many rare, and many only available to view in Frisco.

Inside the museums, amongst their various exhibits, it felt to me like I bumped up against another layer, one completely unexpected, unassuming, and amazing. Tampere and Friso recreate independent game shops. Each museum stages micro-historical scenes that slip passed the grand history of games, adding specific weight, physical evidence, to transformative events dotting timelines. Written accounts along with museum exhibitions on the history of games are partial to privileging founders, inventors, developers, companies, and, of course, celebrated hard and software titles. The quickest Wikipedia search reveals how easily the past is chopped up into increments of time determined by binary digits (e.g. eras of 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit…). New hardware ushers in emergent eras that structure how the past is valued and how history is often composed. That is, what counts as significant for history. Independent game stores aren’t Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony. They aren’t the Marios or Master Chiefs of the past…or present. In Tampere and Frisco independent game stores are given relevance. A recreated game shop reduces the scale of game history to the molecular unit of retail sales, the once common point of purchasing a game as a face-to-face social, public experience.

Deep inside the Finnish Museum of Games, when walking past the exhibit for Supreme Snowboarding, the first Finnish game to sell over a million copies, I turn a corner to enter a retro game shop. Nintendo character plushies like Yoshi and Toad, software titles for the Sega Dreamcast, PS2, and N64, Gameboys galore, along with controllers for the N64, Gamecube, PS2, and Dreamcast cram the shop’s shelves from floor to ceiling. Games are displayed in their original packaging. A boxed Microsoft Xbox and Sony PS2 sit like crowning gems atop these stocked shelves. Near the register – yes, there’s even a register in the exhibit – glass display cases contain loose NES cartridges of Metal Gear, Dr. Mario, and Metroid, showcasing the resale market for secondhand games at these shops.

 

The exhibit is convincing. Maybe too convincing. I found myself wondering, if these items are for sale. The register’s cables connected to a power source, a service bell, and monitor all conspire to trick me that this is more than a recreation, that it’s an actual shop deep within the museum. I’m not alone in this observation. Outi Penninkangas, a researcher at the museum, also finds the exhibit, a little “too authentic” for visitors. Do they try to purchase items in the exhibit?

 

The Finnish Museum of Games values the space of retail in its documentation of Finnish game history. The examples of titles shared above and below were not developed in Finland, of course. Their inclusion concretely evidences the general popularity of games and game play in Finland. A global industry stocks these retail shelves. While the museum’s mission is to document, collect, exhibit games developed in Finland it doesn’t do so to the exclusion of hardware and software titles popular the world over. Regional emphasis is neither an attempt to exclusively celebrate Finnish game development, nor a push to elevate its status. Rather, the Finnish Museum of Games serves as a conduit channeling Finnish developers into a global economy of games. How Finland has contributed to and shaped the global market and culture of games is the lesson on display.

 

The retail exhibit also accounts for the social experience of purchasing game-related products. On the one hand, I witness the increased popularity of shops – be it in Tokyo, Riga, Tampere, or your city – that specialize in collectible, out-of-print games. A desire for “former-gen” displaces the immediacy of “next-gen” in these niche markets. On the other hand, I’m also reminded that many places associated with retail sales of entertainment media have shuttered over the last 30 years.

Porno-theaters with their noisy projector and sticky video booths went flaccid.

Video stores degenerated like magnetic tape.

Book shops avoid the shredder thanks to lavender lattes and laptops.

Music stores refrain from playing their final note thanks to the vinyl revival.

The independent game shop is already on the list of antiquated media, passe social spaces. But here, in Tampere, an exhibit in a museum, demonstrates that the history of games – the history of games in Finland – includes the social space of consumption, where players could demo games on a display kiosk for the Dreamcast, discuss new games with shop assistants, visit a shop with friends. It proved a highlight, a destination, a place meaningful in the social and economic ecology of games. This increasing absence Outi identifies as a major emphasis for the museum’s recreation. These were places where people, he explains, “could ‘touch’ games, discuss with [a] shopkeeper, meet other players and for example rent consoles.”

Today “storefronts” no longer mean “bricks and mortar.” Digital distribution be it Steam, Amazon Luna Cloud Gaming, Apple Arcade, or Xbox Game Pass, removes the physical storage medium of an optical disc altogether thus making any visit to a shop superfluous. These shops provided services (e.g. rentals), social community, and tactile experiences with games. Like handling a videocassette box to learn more about a potential rental, I reached for the copy of Rez for Dreamcast as I only ever played the PS2 version. I felt the urge to touch PaRappaTheRapper 2 along with many other titles remembered fondly or never known.

The finite dimensions of the retail shop drew me to these products. Just being surrounded by this stuff stoked the desire to touch as Outi intended. The packaged container is a flattened form on screens today when previewing downloadable titles on Xbox Game Pass. The intimacy of those lumbering packed shelves at arm’s length is foreign to cloud gaming or absurd when browsing a staggering “14,928” titles (the number shown when I last checked) available on the Xbox Store. Such selection is overwhelming, a solitary experience. It’s far from closeness, hardly communal.

The Finnish Museum of Games’ exhibit maintains a social space, like so many public places, that is shrinking. Its real object of history is not necessarily the enormous amount of preserved stuff lining shelves or even the register fooling me but us, the visitors, who pass through this space: a subject enveloped within a once familiar setting recreated to enact social practices. Our presence reenacting the social space brings meaning to the recreation. We are the display.

Frisco’s version of a retail space shoulders an entirely different social. It offers a microlevel experiential scene of the recession that impacted the US game industry in the mid-1980s when billions of dollars were lost. The factors causing the downward spiral are many: market saturation of third-party titles vying for the pacesetter Atari VCS’s cartridge slot, reduced retail prices of game cartridges due to increased competition, shifts away from popular action-oriented arcade ports to more narrative driven games, hardware expansion components that allowed other systems (e.g. Intellivision) to run Atari VCS cartridges, and in the case of Atari Inc. poor business decisions, over production, and challenges to quality control.

Like the factors that contributed to the recession, historical coverage of the so-called “great video game crash of 1983” is encyclopedic. Absent from any account of the recession with its trail of bankruptcies is the microlevel effect: how the crash played out in the space of retail.

Frisco’s recreation is of an independent shop specializing in video game merchandize – not a division in a department store or aisle in a toy store. The checkout desk complete with cash register fronts the shop’s inventory. Behind it, shelves of boxed original game cartridges point to companies producing titles for their hardware (e.g. Atari, Mattel, Coleco). These same shelves also showcase the tide of third-party titles flooding the market in the early 1980s. Shelves and vintage in-store advertisements display products from fly-by-night companies like Apollo, M-Network, Data Age, US Games. A “Store Closing, Everything Must Go” banner hangs beneath a shelf supporting examples of the various competing consoles on the market at the time of the recession: Intellivision, Odyssey 2, Vectrex, ColecoVision, Atari 5200, Arcadia 2001. A retail display case becomes a resource to help visitors gain even more insight into specific factors linked to the crash. Title cards like “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Can I Return This Game,” and “Emerson Arcadia 2001” attest to quality control issues that stymied the market.

 

In its testament to the time, one display speaks even louder than the “Store Closing” banner. A run-of-the-mill “Clearance Sale Everything Must Go” sign is affixed to a wire basket. The basket is chock full of games at deeply discounted prices. First-party and third-party games alike rest in the remainder bin. Good games, Atari’s Missile Command, and not-so-good games, UA Ltd’s Cat Trax for the Atari VCS, are tossed into the basket’s pile of disarrayed packages. Vibrant hues of red, yellow, green, blue, orange, purple once designed to get the heart racing flatline here. Like a countdown to industry Armageddon, price tags show the steep discounts: $9.99, $7.99, 99¢. This wire basket testifies that the recession didn’t play favorites. Titles by Atari, Mattel, Activision, Imagic, Parker Brothers, and Vidtec amass like sludge.

 

For many around at the time and not directly connected to the industry, this wire basket is familiar. Different perspectives on an all too prevalent narrative. Where today we might say, “crash,” yesteryear shouted “cheap games!” Frisco tells not just the common industry centered narrative, but of entrepreneurial ventures (small business ownership of an independent game shop) and the assorted experience of consumers who may have delighted in those .99¢ bargains. What’s to lose when in 1983 you can take a chance on a Pac-Man derivative like Lock ‘n’ Chase for about the same price as an orange sherbet push pop from an ice cream truck?

 

Tampere and Frisco reduce the scale, remove layers, of the larger histories accounted for at each museum. They zoom in on the microworlds of retail experiences, present an often overlooked node in the game industry network and stage events minor in the historical coverage of games predicated on development and products. Here’s a counter-exhibit to all the ones filled with game products that greet us behind glass at museums, the recreation of a slowly dying space that we ourselves enliven.

Tampere reinvigorates our tactile experiences with game products in a present moment when digital distribution redirects that experience from place to screen. Frisco scales down abstract industry economics to evidence what the recession looked like at the local level of consumption. Neither place appeared out of the ordinary in their heydays. If anything, our visit to the local video game shop was uneventful, habitual, routine, just a familiar part of game culture. Tampere and Frisco dehabituate the habitual treating the recreated game shop as an object lesson to express the loss of social community and physical presence and materially witness economic downtrend. Many layers revealed, many different layers connected.

Tampere returns, restages a social experience as an event, to heighten visitor awareness of the game shop’s disappearance and their once central role in Finland.

Frisco stages the lived experience of the game crash from the ground-level perspective of everyday consumers and small business owners: groups who had the rug pulled out from under them in the mid-1980s. Here the industry crash is played out on the tiled floor of a game shop, on its shelves, and at the bottom of a wire basket

The post Museum Games #2 Staging Microhistory in Tampere & Frisco appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Clear-eyed at last, I found myself cataloguing the differences. Not between Athens and Heraklion, or between riot cops and farmers, but between what I’d been shown and what I’d been denied. The teargas had been indiscriminate — it didn’t care whether you were a protester, a tourist with a rolling suitcase, or a scholar on a research trip to a video game museum. Neither do the barriers that US museums unwittingly erect around game history. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The museums I visited across Europe and Asia had been doing something quietly, without fanfare, that I hadn’t fully registered until I was standing in Tallinn looking at a shelf.

Enter the smaller scale.

What these museums are doing isn’t revolutionary, and they wouldn’t claim otherwise. They chronicle, document, and evidence a general history of games for their visitors — the same broad sweep you’d find at The Strong or the Computer History Museum — while also broadening the historical script to show when and how video games first appeared in their own countries. They address the social, economic, and political conditions that shaped access to games and game play. Where relevant, they surface local game development: developers invisible at the larger scale, absent from US museums unless their name is Shigeru Miyamoto. I don’t regard any of this as a counternarrative, or a disruption to an established timeline (that’s what historians ought to do), or an attempt to win space within capital-H History. The mission is humbler than that, and more effective for it, if not enough to cause a few blushes at US institutions. These museums simply account for the history of video games within both a global and a specific national context. One that isn’t placeless. One that is entirely about experience and access at a particular place. Visitors leave knowing that when the Nintendo GameBoy was out of reach to players in Soviet Bloc countries, the Brick Game handheld became their game history. That’s not a footnote. That is history for people, in those places.

LVL Up! in Tallinn is easy to underestimate. You don’t walk into the tiny space expecting to have your assumptions rearranged. But something stops me near the back of the museum: a top shelf lined with decorative neon Pac-Man monsters, their glow familiar and almost comforting, until I notice what they’re partially obscuring. Propped against them is an Xbox copy of Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019), the detective RPG developed under the lead of Estonian science fiction author Robert Kurvitz. Pac-Man doesn’t disappear. Disco Elysium doesn’t displace it. Both are visible, occupying the same shelf without apology. The arrangement says more about curation than most title cards I’ve read. Elsewhere in the museum other shelves fill in a history that US museums would never think to tell: Kosmonaut, a 1990 DOS game developed by Estonia’s Bluemoon Interactive; Oota Sa! (1984), a Soviet-era clone of Nintendo’s Mickey Mouse Game & Watch title, available here during occupation. The shelf isn’t making an argument. It doesn’t need to.

In Wrocław, the Museum of Games & Computers of the Past Era doesn’t explain the Cold War divide — it exhibits it. A corner of the museum recreates two domestic interiors side by side: one Eastern Bloc, one Western. You don’t need the title cards to witness the difference. The Eastern side announces itself in mustard-yellow wallpaper and a sturdy, utilitarian sideboard — the kind of furniture built to last because it had to, because there wasn’t going to be anything better arriving soon. On it sits a Soviet-manufactured 8-inch portable CRT-TV, a TeleStar 4004 from Mezon Works in Leningrad, running a ball-and-paddle game: a Video Sports Skylark 124, made by the Korean company Sunkyong Ltd. in 1977. Across the corner, the Western side offers an ergonomic office chair pulled close to something that aspires to be a workstation — chrome tubing, black surfaces, Bauhaus-by-way-of-the-1980s. A Commodore 64 sits connected to a Philips color monitor with a playable floppy disk version of Pac-Man from 1983 waiting on screen.

Same corner. Same time-period. Entirely different worlds.

The title card fills in what the objects imply: consumer technologies in Eastern Bloc countries experienced roughly a ten-year lag. Embargoes and price points kept Nintendo Entertainment Systems and Commodore computers out of Polish living rooms while cloned PONG variants graced the sturdier, more practical surfaces on the other side of the curtain. The TVG-10 ball-and-paddle console was Polish game history at a moment when the West had already moved on. I find myself standing in front of the Eastern sideboard thinking about all the objects that populate US museum exhibitions — the Atari VCS, the NES, the Commodore 64 on the other side of this very corner — and how confidently they are presented as the history of games. They are somebody’s history. Just not everybody’s.

A room can do a lot. At the National Museum of Scotland’s hosting of the travelling Game On 2.0 exhibition in 2024, the history of games unfolds much as it does at US museums: the hardware timeline, the software milestones, the coin-ops set to free play. But two rooms pull the exhibition off the universal highway and onto a local road. One reconstructs the social geography of arcade gaming in Edinburgh itself, name-checking actual venues — “Sega Park,” “University Arcades” — that existed in the city. Another devotes itself entirely to Rockstar Games, with Dundee identified as the birthplace of the Grand Theft Auto series and Rockstar North anchored to Edinburgh. The rooms don’t feel like interruptions. They feel like the exhibition finally planting its feet, acknowledging where it is.

In Cangas, near Vigo, MUVI — the Museo Do Videoxogo — goes further. An entire room is given over to the museum’s preservation efforts around Galician game history, and at its center is The Wall, the first commercial video game developed in Galicia. Álex González Quintana was 25 when he made it in 1986 on an MSX microcomputer. He wasn’t trying to launch a company in Vigo. He was trying to learn programming. On display is the first tape copy of The Wall that the software company Erbe pressed into his hands. The game’s adversaries include a mussel, a quiet unhurried nod to the estuaries of Vigo Bay. 7,000 copies sold across Spain. Modest by any commercial measure, but sales aren’t the point. The point is that González Quintana made something specific to a place, from a place. MUVI decided that was worth a room. Worth preserving.

Berlin’s Computerspielmuseum earns its floor space. The “Wall of Hardware” alone — a timeline running from Channel F to Sega Dreamcast — could occupy an afternoon. Spacewar!, Tennis for Two, the Magnavox Odyssey, Computer Space, PONG: the expected landmarks are all present, but the museum keeps expanding the frame. The Ferranti Nimrod (1951) and Noughts and Crosses (1952), both British, appear alongside the American institutional canon. Nam June Paik’s Participation TV (1963) turns up in the commercialization section, a reminder that the impulse to make television interactive wasn’t the exclusive property of Baer, Bushnell, Alcorn, and Dabney. The Computerspielmuseum is generous, inclusive in a way I’ve come to recognize as a quiet rebuke. Then it turns its attention inward.

A section devoted to games and gaming in the German Democratic Republic pulls back a curtain that US museums could never open from their side of the wall. An East German programmer speaks on video. Excerpts from a television documentary show young people at the Dresden Data Processing Center, their relationship to programming catching something between fascination and necessity. A surviving BSS 01 — a GDR-manufactured PONG variant that cost half a month’s salary and lived mostly in schools and youth recreation centers — sits behind glass. A playable Polyplay coin-op machine anchors the corner: the only coin-op ever produced in the GDR, found at trade union leisure centers rather than arcades.

One object on display stops me.

The label reads Seifendosen-Pong. Translation: Soap Box Pong.

The BSS 01 was expensive, didn’t sell well, and was discontinued within a few years of its release. Western consoles were effectively inaccessible in the GDR. So someone — described only as a “master craftsman” — built their own. The controllers are soap boxes. The housing for the AY-3-8500 chip is a repurposed food container. Soap Box Pong ran from 1981 to 1984, filling the void left by the BSS 01’s demise.

I stood in front of the peculiar object for a long time.

I keep returning to the teargas in Athens — the chemical pall that descended on everyone equally, tourist and protester and passerby alike, and the cordon of riot cops that forced a different route. Soap Box Pong is what happens when the cordon has been up for decades. Cultural memory isn’t universal: it’s circumstantial, assembled from whatever materials are actually at hand. A “placeless” history of games, the kind confidently displayed at US museums, doesn’t account for the craftsman in East Germany who needed a food container to play PONG. It can’t. It isn’t looking in that direction.

Málaga’s OXO Museo Videojuego operates on different levels — and I mean that in every sense. Level 1 is generous and familiar: seventy years of the medium laid out through hardware, software, handhelds, and coin-ops, with the expected pioneers — Higinbotham, Baer, MIT students, Atari’s earliest iterations — anchoring one end of the timeline. Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Atari hold their usual positions. So do Amiga, Neo-Geo, and Vectrex which is a more inclusive roster than most. But one company profile stops me: DiNamic, presented here as La Primera Compañía De Videojuegos De España. It sits on the same floor as Nintendo and Sega without apology or explanation, as if its presence requires neither. From where OXO stands, a game museum in Spain, this is simply legible storytelling. DiNamic distributed nationally and internationally; it belongs in this company. I recognize Nintendo. I don’t recognize DiNamic. That asymmetry is my problem, not the museum’s.

Level 1 is prologue. One staircase up and the museum becomes something else entirely.

Level 2 belongs to DiNamic. The full title: Exposición Temporal: Dinamic, La Primera Compañía Española de Videojuegos. An entire level devoted to a game company founded by four brothers — Pablo, Víctor, Nacho, and Gaby Ruiz — who built a Spanish games industry more or less from scratch. The exhibition doesn’t treat DiNamic as a footnote to a larger story. It is the story: original packaging art and character concept sketches pinned alongside the finished products; multiple software formats for PC Fútbol laid out to show the reach of a single title; press coverage and advertising charting the company’s public life; personal items from the Ruiz brothers that collapse the distance between institution and family. Interactive stations running Los Justicieros, Narco Police, and Navy Moves keep the games playable rather than merely displayable. I spent nearly two hours on Level 2. I wasn’t being thorough in my research. I was genuinely absorbed.

It’s worth noting that OXO recently opened a second museum in Madrid, where DiNamic was actually based — which means the Málaga exhibition isn’t strictly local in an Andalusian sense. “The local” here operates at national scale: Videojuegos De España. That’s a meaningful distinction. OXO isn’t claiming regional ownership of DiNamic; it’s insisting that Spanish game history belongs in the same room as world game history. Level 1 and Level 2 aren’t in tension. They’re in conversation.

Málaga devotes an entire level to one company. Tampere devotes an entire museum to the proposition that Finnish game history is world game history and then shows it.

Suomen Pelimuseo doesn’t ease you in. The density of home-grown material is immediate and relentless: Painter Boy, the country’s first advergame, produced for paint manufacturer Tikkurila; Uuno Turhapuro Muuttaa Maalle, the first Finnish licensed game based on a domestic film; the Salora Playmaster, Finland’s first ball-and-paddle console, alongside its clone Pip-peli, assembled from Playmaster parts by Salora employees — Google Translate renders Pip-peli as “wiener,” as in a penis, which I choose to believe was intentional. The list keeps going. Star Dust, Sanxion, Shadow Cities, Supreme Snowboarding, Suunnistussumulaattori — and that’s just the S’s. Angry Birds is here too, if you need the landmark. I stopped trying to keep count of games developed in Finland and started simply moving through the space.

What keeps the museum from collapsing into national self-congratulation is its depth of field. Aapeli, the first Finnish digital gaming device, was built by the Mathematics Committee on an ESKO computer in 1955. Chesmac, a chess simulator, is documented as the first commercially published Finnish computer game, in 1979. An early and obscure Tolkien adaptation, LORD, was programmed on a DEC-20 at the Helsinki University of Technology in the early 1980s — years before Tolkien licensing became an industry. The museum doesn’t position this history as exceptional or corrective. It positions it as history, full stop, running alongside non-Finnish hardware and software without apology or hierarchy. My time at Suomen Pelimuseo was long. Genuinely, embarrassingly long.

And then, near the end of it, I found Winner.

Bally’s Winner was the only officially licensed version of Atari’s Pong. It was manufactured in Chicago. I had traveled thousands of miles to finally see and play something originally made a few hours’ drive from where I work. Place matters, Melanie Swalwell tells us. Standing in front of Winner in Tampere, I felt the full weight of that claim settle. Not as an abstraction. As a coin-op machine in Finland that I couldn’t find at home. Winner in Tampere follows me home.

So does the craftsman in East Germany and his soap boxes. So does the mussel in González Quintana’s game, swimming through the estuaries of Vigo Bay on an MSX microcomputer in 1986. These are the things that place makes possible. Placelessness erases them.

The question that travels back with me is the one Laine Nooney framed with surgical precision when contributing her own regional game historical research to Swalwell’s collection: the challenge confronting US game history “isn’t that it has no sense of the local, but that we don’t know how to grasp it.” Nooney was writing to game historians. That difficulty belongs equally to US museums. The local is there. The regional is there. The problem is the reaching.

Some of it is simply geography. The Computer History Museum sits in Mountain View — the same zip code, more or less, as Nutting Associates, whose Computer Space lives in the collection. Atari’s footprint in Los Gatos and Sunnyvale is a short drive. Stanford’s AI Lab, where Bushnell and Dabney first encountered Spacewar!, is close enough to matter. And somewhere in the museum’s storage sits Galaxy Game — built by Computer Recreations in 1971 and installed at Stanford’s Tressider Union, one of the first coin-operated computer games ever made, on the same campus the museum is invoking. The National Videogame Museum in Frisco has id Software’s Dallas-Fort Worth origins within reach — the regional history of DOOM is also a Texas history. Gearbox Studios and 3D Realms are neighbors.

These connections exist. They’re just not fully apparent in the exhibition spaces yet.

The Strong is a different case. Rochester isn’t a game development hub, but The Strong has built something the other two institutions haven’t: a place where history happens, where collectors and companies and researchers converge because the archival gravity is strong enough to pull them in. It displays Tennis for Two and maintains connections with Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY — the site of the game’s creation. That story is right there, waiting for a room. And if OXO can devote an entire floor to DiNamic in Málaga — a company with no particular Andalusian connection — The Strong can stage the equivalent: bring the DiNamic exhibition to Rochester. Bring the story of Disco Elysium to Rochester. Build the Eastern Bloc corner. The research collections are already making the case. The question is whether the galleries decide to listen. A museum with a World Video Game Hall of Fame has, after all, made a promise about its scope.

And that promise, it turns out, is being kept elsewhere. Back in Heraklion — where the farmers blocked the taxis and the riot cops blocked the road — the Video Games Museum is developing an exhibition on Law 3037/2002, the now-infamous Greek legislation that attempted to ban electronic games outright as part of a crackdown on illegal gambling, shuttering internet cafés and disrupting everyday play in the early 2000s. Manolis Varouchas, the museum’s Director, describes an exhibition that will use that moment to explore moral panic, public policy, media discourse, and the place of video games in Greek everyday life. In other words, how does a local Greek experience with games stand alongside the more familiar international history of the medium? It hasn’t opened yet. But the fact that it’s being built at all — in Crete, by a museum I nearly couldn’t reach — is its own kind of answer to the question this installment has been asking.

Because here’s what the teargas taught me, and what Soap Box Pong confirmed, and what Winner in Tampere made impossible to ignore: a history without place is a cordon. It marks a perimeter. It tells you there is nothing to see beyond this point, move along, the story ends with the NES, Xbox, and PlayStation. The museums I visited across Europe — in Tallinn, Wrocław, Edinburgh, Vigo, Berlin, Málaga, Tampere — don’t accept that perimeter. They flushed their eyes and looked again. They built rooms for mussels and soap boxes, for a craftsman in East Germany and four brothers in Madrid, for a 25-year-old teaching himself to program on a coast most of their visitors had never thought about, for a ball-and-paddle game cloned from parts in a Leningrad factory, for a Finnish wiener, for a Chicago coin-op that had to travel thousands of miles to find a home.

US museums can do the same. The local is there. They just need to grasp it.

The post Something’s amiss in the US. Part 2 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

My most recent book, King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions, shows how Atari established not one but two massive consumer technology categories by adopting innovative product positioning and market development strategies. I conclude the short book with a chapter that briefly explains how PONG is continuing to lead in the development of new markets, namely the cultural heritage market experienced at museums. When I wrote the book’s conclusion, I envisioned it as a bridge to Museum Games. I felt impatient. I couldn’t wait to start this next journey.

PONG – whether in its coin-op form, home version, or facsimile – makes an appearance at every museum that I’ve visited—and I’ve visited many. Its presence speaks to a number of narratives pertinent to exhibiting game history: an origin story for the US games industry, a face for a legendary games company, a product that succeeded in two separate industries (coin-op amusement and consumer electronics), a controversy vis a vis Magnavox Odyssey, and an incredibly vast number of derivative ball-n-paddle games produced globally in the 1970s. PONG’s image is the symbol of game history, a requisite object for museums devoted to video games.

This installment to Museum Games neither celebrates PONG’s iconic status at museums, nor questions whether its pervasiveness is warranted. Of course it is! Its prominence intrigues me but that’s not all it does. Precisely because I see it everywhere, it has grown banal, anticipated, unavoidable. “There it is, AGAIN,” I say to myself. PONG-fatigue deep in my bones. I suppose it’s worth noting that I’m no average visitor to video game museums. If you’ve been following my travels, you already know that it’s my mission to visit as many video game museums as possible. PONG-fatigue is entirely self-inflicted. I want desperately to shake it off. I cannot do so by pretending to forget what I already know about PONG. I cannot un-think it. That deep knowledge travels with me, shapes, and informs my understanding of all things PONG. It’s not coat checked upon entry to a museum.

Taking a page (or multiple) out of art historian, James Elkins’ voluminous works, I’ve instead made my looking at PONG the object of study. Elkins’ emphasis on patient, concerted looking isn’t just directed towards works by Mondrian but also banal things like a twig or the pavement. PONG’s ubiquitous, everyday status expired decades ago. It’s no longer an ordinary thing like a postage stamp.

To encounter an original coin-op or console version of PONG, a journey to a museum is most likely required. The journey itself plucks PONG out of the one-time-familiar to alight in the space of museums the world over. There I want PONG to captivate me, as I commit my full attention to it. This after all is what museums do well—they show us things, focus our looking at things shown. Here is where I want my looking at PONG to surprise me.

So, I went a step farther and immersed myself in the museum contexts of PONG. That’s no typo. There are a lot of different museum contexts in my travels. Looking at PONG in Shanghai is different than looking at PONG in Rochester. At both museums, I strive to see what I’m being shown while considering my own looking. I embrace slow looking. I slow down to look at the process of displaying PONG, where and how it is displayed in a museum, and what objects are nearby as well as the thing itself – its physical details – and the museum that exhibits it.

I convince myself to stop rushing past yet another PONG exhibit. Slowing down allows me to look longer, closer, more carefully.

I’ve jotted down directives that I exercise to look at PONG. My efforts in compiling this list, a self-imposed assignment, helps to alleviate the tedious encounters with PONG. Fatigue gives way to a new and delicious patience for PONG. What details and discoveries might this patient, prolonged looking reveal?

Look at PONG from a distance.

Chances are you’ll see it soon after entering a museum, or even off in the distance when purchasing your tickets. It’s that prominent. When you spy it from afar, notice what other objects are nearby as you advance. Even in museums objects don’t exist in isolation. They reside in rooms with people, signage, lighting, entry ways; they are placed behind other objects (e.g. glass, stanchion), or upon other objects (e.g. shelving, flooring). Museums fill the eye with both obvious (e.g. objects on display) and obscure stuff (e.g. seating, power outlets, toilet signs).

Looking from a distance, you will probably observe a Computer Space cabinet produced by Nutting Associates. The Nexon Computer Museum in Jeju, South Korea displays a replica of the prototype to PONG about one foot away from Nutting’s machine.

The same is true in Frisco, Texas and Zagreb, Croatia, among other places. The pairing is commonplace. We are shown that the industry begins here, with these two machines. Title cards are universal on this subject. Computer Space wears the crown of the first mass produced coin-op video game, but its sales and production numbers underwhelmed the industry. PONG succeeded where Computer Space failed. This pairing also places Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell at the developmental helm for Computer Space when employed by Nutting Associates and soon after leading their own company along with Al Alcorn who engineered Atari’s first product. PONG in this exhibition context is an ur-object. It displays when electronic games left the research institution to become productized for commercial usage and general public consumption.

Observe PONG as a museum object.

How is it displayed to visitors? What statement does PONG’s curation make about it? In Berlin, PONG is displayed behind red stanchion. What does this barrier say about the object it sequesters? It distinguishes it from other objects not bestowed such treatment. PONG is made singular, elevated from the surrounding array of other objects (the only other artifact given such treatment is the requisite, Computer Space).

Visitors are given a polite, “Please don’t touch.” PONG is not a game to play, but an object to admire at a distance. The intimacy of touch is verboten. Contemplation is the only game to play at this exhibit. Like paintings displayed in an art museum, we stand in PONG’s presence. Its screen does not display its game. We stare at a blank screen, at a wooden cabinet with minimal decor. Other visitors may join in this act of staring. Others may stare at visitors gathered around the display staring at PONG. It captures and commands attention. This attention affords an honorific, edifying status.

This honorific status does not require stanchion when PONG is displayed as an early inductee in the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong Museum. Its mere presence in this gallery is enough. This space is reserved for only those games voted into this Hall of Fame space. Only members are included.

At the Nationaal Videogame Museum in Zoetermeer, The Netherlands the stanchion is abandoned. PONG becomes a testament to a moment, the 1970s. It’s a prop in a period room.

It rests on brown wall-to-wall carpeting. Stands next to a brown and orange plaid sofa. A wooden coffee table and wooden television cabinet add more realistic touches to the scene. Vintage objects, PONG included, stage a bygone era. It’s a domestic scene where a coin-op version of PONG wouldn’t have featured. Its inclusion evidences the time period while motioning to the beginning of electronic video games entering the home. Its meaning here is less honorific like in Berlin or Rochester than indicative of a growing and changing industry with both public and domestic spaces increasingly inundated with video games.

Observe PONG as a material object.

Walk right up to the stanchion in Berlin or place your body directly against PONG in Zoetermeer after sitting on the nearby sofa. Compare your body’s size to that of the coin-op machine. Are you taller? Shorter? Do you stoop down to see the cabinet’s screen? Or do you find yourself on tiptoes to reach the control panel and see the screen? Unless you are a kid, the former is the case. PONG is short in stature. The reason is due to finances. Atari lacked capital to produce its launch product. Longer cuts of wood for the cabinet cost more. Its size came down to money, or lack thereof. Push the phrase “video game” out of your immediate awareness to see a small television in a wooden cabinet. Observe how the television is obscured by the yellow bezel with matte black interior giving the impression of a much larger screen than 13-inches. Ask yourself: would you know what this thing is in 1972?

Now, look at PONG as a functional wooden cabinet.

It’s a container to house electronic components to run a… “video skill game,” the term preferred on Atari’s marketing materials as the phrase “video game” wasn’t prevalent in 1972. Its electronic components are not accessible to users from the front or either side. Our relation to PONG is external. Access to its power supply, monitor, and circuit board are removed from the user. They are safeguarded inside with service access located at the back of the cabinet. This layout accords with other electromechanical machines of the era: they are intentionally designed to have their backs against a wall, with all attention afforded to their front and sides. Those are the only spaces presented to users. We are placed on the outside of the cabinet, given limited access as a user of the machine. Our engagement is limited, physically defined. Only operators can go inside the cabinet. They can enter the internal world of a new medium. Functionality is for service, and to support the safe and enjoyable use of a product. I nearly forgot, there is another space open to users: the coin-slot, located directly on the front panel. From Atari’s point-of-view it’s the most important function of the cabinet.

Keep looking slowly, examine PONG as a wooden cabinet designed to attract customers, people willing to drop a coin in that coin-slot.

What is optically available to you? Its façade is yellow. Highly visible from afar and in low levels of light. Why might that be an important ingredient to attract a player? Does it speak to where one would’ve played PONG in the early 1970s? If you answered at a bar, you are correct! The prototype to PONG was field tested at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. Does the game’s name attract customers? What do you notice about it? The type is black, a stark contrast to its yellow façade. The type isn’t script. It’s a sans serif font: easy to read from distance, not ornate. It doesn’t illustrate the cabinet’s contents other than displaying a name. It’s discreet. Humble yet bold. Mysterious.

How does the name, “PONG,” feel in your mouth? Repeat it a few times. It’s easy to pronounce due to its monosyllabic sound. Do you say it loudly as the all-caps suggest? Is it fun to pronounce? POOOONNNGGG! POOONG! PONG! PONG! PONG! Do you try to imitate the sound that you imagine –a hollow “PUCK” sound bursting out of your mouth? Like The Chordettes’s song “Lollipop” mimicked in the film Stand By Me when the gang of boys replicate the POP sound of the song by flicking their finger quickly out of their mouth. Or think of Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” if you know that tune. Similar fun effect. Why do you think Atari named its first product, PONG? Nolan Bushnell loves telling the story of the word “Pong’s” meaning in British English—it connotes a rancid odor as in, “the rubbish pongs.” Not exactly the best name to attract British players! Still, it’s short. Only one half of the more common Ping-Pong. Sans “Ping,” PONG intrigues. And that phosphorous TV screen with two paddles, net, score, and bouncing ball shows what it is.

Keep looking slowly, examine PONG as a wooden cabinet designed for various environments.

A video game may be fun to play, challenging, a genuine sucker of quarters but it’s none of this without gaining acceptance at locations. It’s designed to attract users, but also to win the approval of location owners. This was PONG’s greatest success: it gained access to locations where pinball and large electromechanical games were not welcomed in the early 1970s. The common phrase “arcade game” only accounts for game rooms and spaces devoted exclusively to coin-op games. It doesn’t capture everyday locations where people could play PONG. It wasn’t an eye sore. No gaudy graphic. Walk around the cabinet and you’ll notice its wood-grain side panels. This touch made PONG stylish, far less obtrusive than other coin-op machines that could wreck the ambiance of a cocktail lounge, hotel lobby, or restaurant. As I’ve written in King PONG, “more places, more profits.” The buzzword at Atari was “sophistication:” design products to look good across different public environments.

Keep looking slowly, examine PONG as a wooden cabinet designed for interaction.

PONG simulates table tennis, or Ping Pong. Two players compete. How does physical interaction with the game shape the experience of play? The game itself is an electronic circuit displayed on a television screen housed within the wooden cabinet. The cabinet is what we interact with directly to control actions displayed on the screen. The cabinet shapes our experience of the game. It enables the play. Would you stand back from the cabinet to interact with its controls? Or would you press your body close to it? Would your stance remain the same across a game, or change with the pulse of play? Think about this when you play alongside another person. Is it crowded at the control panel? Do you know the person you play with or do you share space with the body of a stranger? Do you find playing PONG intimate or intimidating? How often do you stand that close to a stranger in public? Before you even touch a controller, does it look comfortable to play? Do you understand how to play just by looking at the knob controllers? What information do they convey? Where would your non-playing hand rest? Would you place it on top of the cabinet? Would you imagine a beer on top of that short cabinet? Although Bushnell declared PONG “easy to learn, difficult to master,” you would not encounter such difficulty in the interaction afforded by the cabinet and its control panel. In your close examination be aware that in 1972 you would tap buttons on the side of a pinball machine to control the game’s flippers, or you’d pull a trigger, twist a periscope, turn a steering wheel on the control panel of an electromechanical game. Our hands had to learn to interact differently on a video game. Our eyes had to learn to look at a screen instead of down a pinball playfield or at objects reflected in a half-silver mirror common on electromechanical games. PONG’s control panel only houses its two knobs for two to play. Simple. Minimal, so that all attention can be directed at the screen, not at our hands. A new template for interacting with an electronic game is introduced. A new posture for play emerges.

What do you see when you look at a reproduction of PONG?

An unusual experience for me was to encounter not one, but two identical coin-op PONGs at the Video Game Museum of CADPA in Shanghai. They are displayed together. Side by side with about two feet separating them.

They look creepy like those kids from The Shining. They are, in fact, shiny. Their wood grain appears more reddish than brown. Their bright yellow bezels show no sign of age. The cabinets appear new without signs of wear typically observed on a coin-op PONG in a museum. When you think about it, it’s amazing that so many PONG coin-ops are in museums. Atari only manufactured around 7,000 units. Many of those were “kits,” the electronic components minus cabinetry for non-US markets. In Shanghai I look at two facsimiles of PONG, surrogates for a history not experienced in China. PONG debuted in the US in 1972 with sales to follow in 1973 in other parts of the world, China not being one. You’d think that during an era of US-China relations touted as “Ping Pong Diplomacy” that PONG could’ve served an ambassadorial role in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s Beijing visit to meet with Chairman Mao Zedong in early 1972. The surrogates in Shanghai are stand-ins to evidence a general history of games, one not yet experienced first-hand in the People’s Republic of China until later in the 1980s. Their presence at the museum in Shanghai also connects China to this general, world history of games when, today, it’s the major market and boasts the largest population of game players. The pair of surrogate PONGs also sparked an unexpected connection for me. Although PONG didn’t grace the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s, today the Unis Technology Co. (headquartered in Guangdong, China) is the most prolific producer of the popular Atari Pong Table game. It’s a reimagined version of the original game that swaps its screen for a mechanically engineered playfield populated by pulleys, magnets, rails, and motors for two-player fun. Unit Tech’s take on PONG is equally at home in game rooms and at museums in Malaga and Vienna.

What do you see when you look at Home PONG?

Like the coin-op version, you will see a lot of home consoles that play PONG, or other ball-and-paddle types of games at museums. Some are displayed on shelves or in a case behind glass so that we can observe them as an object of game history. Others appear in the context of a recreated domestic scene where they sit upon a coffee table (a common indicator of domestic gaming I’ve come to appreciate at museums). This type of scene interests me the most. I encourage you to take it all in. Recreations of domestic spaces, typically a living room space, convey scenes of when video games became part of the everyday home environment. I’ve observed such recreations situate a new consumer technology within the lives and lifestyles of people in Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Finland, Spain, and the US. Consider that a room had to house these new consumer devices. A kitchen might be too risky, and a bedroom would limit which members of the family had access.

The living room coffee table becomes a democratizing object, granting access to all in front of the television. But don’t fixate your looking on the game console alone. All of the objects assembled, displayed, constitutive of the recreation communicate meaning collectively. They are common things. Installed as objects in a recreation due to their banality. Their lesson is in their ability to extend their commonality to the new object now occupying the shared space. They made space for it. The assembly of recognizable furnishings – throw rugs, patterned period wallpaper, wooden furniture like coffee tables, storage consoles, book shelves for that “lived in” touch, upholstered sofas, lamps, radios, record players, cathode-ray televisions, and other assorted decorative knick-knacks usually of a 1970s kitschy variety with regional connections – installed to create the scene of domestic game play naturalize the then new experience. It’s easy to overlook or forget this today since we’ve now lived with video games for over 50 years. But sometime in the 1970s, specific years differ depending on which country you lived in during that period, the ability to play PONG or a ball-and-paddle derivative in the home was indeed a new experience. What’s on display is less the physical object of a home PONG console in this domestic scene, than the perceivable moment when the familiar living room with its habitual objects rearranged and recentered itself. A public gaming practice in the form of coin-op machine was now at arm’s reach from that ever-present sofa, common as that coffee-table.

What do you see when you look at PONG clones?

Berlin, Wroclaw, and Zagreb’s exhibits on the subject of PONG derivatives tell us that they are referred to as clones. Riga’s Video Spelu Muzejs taught me to appreciate this incredible legion of PONG clones.

There are simply too many on display not to feel awed. The sheer volume functions as a testament to their value. In US game history, the term “clone” is a pejorative label that dismisses efforts to capitalize on PONG’s migration to the home in the mid-1970s. Atari utilized a proprietary custom microchip for its home version of the wildly popular coin-op machine, but once ball-and-paddle integrated circuits could be acquired by any manufacturer, the global market quickly became flooded with PONG variations. In Riga I look at Atari’s line of Tele-Games PONG consoles produced for Sears alongside its own consumer line of products. I also see familiar product lines from Coleco Telstar and Magnavox. That’s where my familiarity with PONG derivatives ends, seen from my small corner of the world. Riga shatters that view. My eyes drink in products from France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, Spain, Sweden, the UK. I’m schooled by product names like “Grandstand,” “Soundic,” “Palson,” “TeleFlip,” “Miragama,” “Videomaster,” “Optim Sport,” “Telegioca” “Video Match,” and “TV8 Sports.” Slapping the label “clones” onto these products only serves a US centric narrative for the history of games. It positions the US as originator with the world as copier. It denies the legitimacy of regional histories, of regionally unique experiences. For many outside the US a game called “PONG” wasn’t the first encounter with a video game. Many only know PONG through their own regional iterations. That new device in the home, may have been called, “Турнир” or “Video Mate TV Jack 1200.” What I observe in Riga isn’t display cases loaded with “knock-offs” or “clones,” but an entirely altered perspective on video games as a global phenomenon and how little I know of it.

Pull back from your close examination to revisit the coin-op version. I find returning to exhibits after prolonged time in a museum a healthy encounter teeming with renewed interests and refreshed eyes. This time around, observe other visitors looking at PONG.

What do they look at? How closely do they look? If it’s an interactive display, do visitors play PONG? Do they quickly pick up on how to play? Can you tell if they’ve played before?

Are they having fun playing a game over 50 years old, one regarded as “ancient” compared to the likes of Red Dead Redemption? Are you close enough to hear what they say about PONG? How long do they play if they play at all? There is pleasure to be had in not playing PONG as well. Looking can be its own form of play. Watching others play is rewarding.

Since you are primed to look at others play, turn your gaze onto yourself. Observe yourself playing in a museum.

Do you play differently than, say, in an arcade? What about when a museum like in Berlin, Zoetermeer, Frisco, Rochester, or Tampere recreate an arcade space within the museum—a space sectioned off from the museum, with its lights a little lower, and machines placed right next to one another like an arcade? Do you talk while you play? Are you still or animated? Do you play hard, mashing buttons aggressively, or is your touch much gentler? Are you aware of museum staff observing your actions with their interactive display? Does this different style of ambiance change your play compared to playing an exhibition with its title card, bright illumination, surrounded by other curated objects, and in a space not demarcated from the surrounding museum? Do you feel like you are on display – a human prop in an interactive exhibition – when you play in a museum? Are you playing a video game or a museum object? Perhaps both simultaneously? Ever think about when a video game becomes a museum object? And how? What does that mean to you?

By looking longer, staying with PONG for a sustained duration, practicing patience in my museum encounters, and not fretting about its prevalence, I’ve come to observe details and experience a familiar object in new ways. PONG for the win.

The post How To Look At PONG appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.