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 17th or 18th 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-20th century, like MUVi specializes in the late 20th 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-20th century America, outside he’s back in the 22nd 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.
