Germany’s Video Game Preservation Project Loses Public Funding

by Patrick Hickey Jr. | Jul 7, 2026 | 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Gaming

Germany-based, Internationale Computerspielesammlung (ICS), whose goal was to assemble the world’s largest publicly accessible video game archive, has lost its public funding, leaving the future of the program in jeopardy, according to the Gameswirtschaft...

Museum Games #6 Space Evaders, Or How Ordinary Public Places of Coin-Op Play Challenge Museums

by Raiford Guins | Jul 2, 2026 | 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Arcade

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...

Museum Games #3 Rapprochement na Habitación da Memoria

by Raiford Guins | Jun 25, 2026 | 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Arcade

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...

Versions of a Burial: The Atari Landfill Excavation in Museums, Part 2

by Raiford Guins | Jun 22, 2026 | 1970s, 1980s, Atari

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...

Video Game Trading Card Spotlight – Nolan Bushnell

by Todd Friedman | Jun 20, 2026 | 1970s, 1980s, Columns

Our next Trading Card Spotlight features Nolan Bushnell, who is displayed on card number 165, from the Superstars of 2011 Collection.  Nolan can also be seen on card number 821 and 1333.  Nolan is the founder of Atari and Check E’ Cheese as well as over 20 other...

Versions of a Burial: The Atari Landfill Excavation in Museums, Part 1

by Raiford Guins | Jun 18, 2026 | 1970s, 1980s, Atari

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...