The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller’s travelogue of Greece, was meant to inspire my visit to Heraklion’s Video Games Museum but teargas blurred that vision.
I left The James Joyce Irish Pub (no, I didn’t start this journey in Dublin—I came across the pub in Athens) where I watched the football club that I support, Leeds United, enjoy a sensational late goal to draw level with Liverpool at 3-3. Jetlag started to rob me of the adrenalin rush from that last gasp goal. I needed sleep, desperately. I settled my tab. Walked towards my hotel.
Illumined in the glow of Google maps, I heard stampeding feet heading my way. A group of 12 – 15 young men dressed in black sped towards me. Swiftly, I moved aside. The racing bodies ran past. I wondered if AEK Athens played Panathinaikos in the Athenian derby that night. Maybe I was simply on the wrong street at the wrong time—Athens’ city center on Saturday, December 6, 2025, after a heated football match.
A new sensation quickly clouded my senses. My throat itched fiercely, face burned, and eyes teared up uncontrollably. Swallowing became difficult: too much coughing, chest too tight. Other people, younger and older, men and women, walked past and alongside me looking just as stunned while shielding their faces with scarves, handkerchiefs, or the crease of an elbow. The chemical pall of teargas engulfed all indiscriminately.
I trudged on towards my hotel with increasing skin, eyes, and lung irritation wondering to myself, “what the fuck?” Turning a corner at the behest of Google Maps, difficult to see clearly with eyes burning, I smacked into a cordon of menacing cops in heavily armored riot gear. Their barricade of transparent polycarbonate shields, helmets with face shields, body armor, and batons at the ready forced me to seek an alternative route.
Upon arriving at the hotel, staff were busy handing out bottles of water to guests and anyone in need. The Adia Aluma Athens, part of Hilton’s Curio Collection with its chic roof top bar and pool offering a glorious view of the Parthenon, became the site of impromptu triage. I gladly accepted a bottle of water. Flushed out my eyes. Soothed my face. I then sat in the lobby perfectly perplexed…thinking about how my experience of water differs from Miller’s excitement over “iced water” in cafes where lovers down tumblers on sweltering Athenian nights. If only.
Teargas, along with stun grenades and blows from batons, stemmed from protest marches marking the 17th Anniversary of Alexandros Grigoropoulos’ murder by police in 2008. Alexandros was 15 when he was shot. His death incited protests against police brutality across Greece back then. And the date is marked by continued protest even today. Judging from the images I watched on the news and stories from protesters holed up in the hotel lobby-cum-triage field unit, police brutality still seems rampant. Teargas was a hell of a way to overcome jetlag.
A day later I landed at Heraklion International Airport in Crete to visit the island’s Video Games Museum. I soon learned that taxis could not access the airport due to farmers protesting nationwide across Greece. The farmers deployed their tractors and trucks to block access to border crossings, ports, motorways, and, as I found out, airports where clashes sparked between local farmers and the police in Heraklion.
Farmers are seeking delayed European Union subsidy payments that have been diverted into funds for non-agricultural needs. This misallocation of millions of Euros has even become known as the Opekepe subsidy scandal (“Opekepe” being Greek shorthand for the Ministry of Rural Development and Food division of Payment and Control Agency for Guidance and to Guarantee Community Aid). Over the summer charges were brought against Opekepe for payments to people who submitted false subsidy claims.
Without access to a taxi, I found myself facing yet another wall of armored riot-police and wondering again, “what the fuck?” Not exactly the sort of welcome that I expected. I envisioned Cretan baklava, not batons. I walked two miles to my hotel. Luckily, I didn’t have to contend with summer heat. Unluckily my rollerboard bag battled gracelessly against cobbles and torn up narrow sidewalk pavers. Upon my arrival, the staff at the Megaron Luxury Hotel must’ve thought to themselves: “Who is this sweaty, frazzled, deranged man babbling about riot cops, farmers, and the lack of taxis at the airport?”
My thoughts drifted to a bitter reminder from that Sex Pistol’s song where Rotten belches, a “cheap holiday in other people’s misery.” In December 2025, it rang true. The protests during my research trip to Greece drew attention to human rights abuses and state corruption within a national context not immediately familiar to me. Encountering not one, but two walls of riot cops, has a way of piercing a tourist’s protective nescience membrane even when they are there, like me, to visit a video game museum.
But as I continually strive to do with this project, I look for meaning in the journey not just at the destination of a video game museum. A museum’s location is part of its story. This trip to Greece was no exception. Both events weighed on me considerably. They showed me what walking down a street unexpectedly into teargas or having to forego the creature comforts of a taxi can offer my research. And, like its namesake, an Irish Pub in Athens made even its random appearance a Joycean encounter with the situation, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”
I would have been unaware of a teenager’s murder, or government agency fraud had I not set out to visit the Video Games Museum in Heraklion. Such locally specific events – social justice protesters marching in Athens, farmers turning their ordinary equipment into resolute political tools – may not have sustained interests back in the States, maybe given only a few seconds of coverage on major media outlets, or a few paragraphs in newspapers. Yet, oddly enough, my “being there” offered me a level of awareness that probably wouldn’t have otherwise affected my thinking about video game museums.
This awareness pertains to local actions, events, and how they resonate beyond the local. Specifically, and for my context, I’m interested to know how the question of “scale” works at video game museums: how stories of local, regionally specific game histories are communicated in conjunction with larger, well-known, general histories (or what we might call universal orthodox history)? I had time to mull this question over during my bumpy walk from Heraklion airport. Dislodged pavers aren’t exactly Joyce’s portals, but they worked their own kind of discovery for me.
US museums like The Strong, the Computer History Museum, and National Videogame Museum organize their game exhibitions at a high altitude. Let’s say that their curatorial frameworks for exhibiting game-related historical collections aren’t locally oriented, situated into local contexts, or aimed at specific places. “Locally” and “local,” here can refer to specific locations within the US and non-US locations, the history and experience of games in various national and transnational contexts.
In other words, the history of games on exhibit at such museums is devoid of actual places. Sure, names like “Brookhaven, NY,” or “Sunnyvale, CA,” or, “MIT,” or “Manchester, NH” may appear on a display’s title card exhibit for Tennis for Two, Atari, Spacewar! and the Magnavox Odyssey but no text explains why that place is significant. To take one example, what type of products were produced in Silicon Valley in the early 1970s, or were game companies even common in that region? Histories of games exhibited at US museums are generalists to the extent that any deviations from this “universal” narrative aren’t present.
It isn’t that the “local” equates overtly with the “US” but that attention to other geographical contexts and experiences are absent. No synthesis between local and general exists. For instance, you won’t see period rooms dedicated to game play in Soviet Bloc countries during the 1980s at The Strong. At the National Videogame Museum, you won’t encounter a Brick Game that was a cloned version of the Nintendo GameBoy wildly popular in Estonia and Poland. And you won’t learn about the Sinclair ZX Spectrum or the Spanish game company, DiNamic, at the Computer History Museum.
You wouldn’t be wrong to object to my assertion (bearing in mind that it’s neither an allegation, nor an attack on these institutions that I respect deeply). You could easily take issue with my assertion by pointing out that the Brick Game or the ZX Spectrum were never released onto the US market. And you could exclaim, that we – in the US – wouldn’t know how games were experienced in Soviet Bloc countries. After all, an Iron Curtain blocked our view of such interior scenes! And you could therefore conclude that it’s absurd for me to even raise the question of the inclusion of non-US released games or non-US game companies (other than Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, of course) on display at US museums. Case closed. Move along folks, there is nothing to see.
But if teargas taught me anything, such a command always suggests that there is, indeed, something to see. Only, what there is to see doesn’t reside at US museums. US museums with collections of video games don’t show a world history of video games, they exhibit an implied place: the history of games is a US-centric game history (with an unavoidable nod to Japan). What matters, what is shown to matter, resides here in the confines of the US, not elsewhere. The “national” in the title of some US museums alludes to this: it points inward, not outward beyond borders. The danger? Game history, from this perspective, becomes bulldozer-ish, universalizing a one-sizes-fits-all historical narrative, or just pushing past the importance of place for the history of games.
Here’s the rub, or an entirely different take: museums in Europe and Asia showcase this universalizing history exhibited at US museums while also directing attention to local game development, regionally situated social experiences with games, and specific geographical contexts and historical conditions. In other words, the likes of an Atari VCS, Sega Genesis, or NES were not available or in some cases affordable to many in Soviet Bloc countries, for instance. They nevertheless feature at museums in Poland, Estonia, and Latvia. Whether a particular console or handheld device was available in the US is a moot point when so many museums around the world strike a balance between universal histories and regionally specific histories: exhibiting what was actually historically present and what wasn’t due to historical circumstances.
From my experience, game museums that I’ve visited outside of the US (with the exception of Kyoto’s Nintendo Museum that feels more like a shrine to the brand than an actual museum) carefully negotiate two scales: 1) a general history of video games; and 2) local, nationally contextualized histories of video games.
Let’s touch upon the larger scale since its observed equally in the US and across the video game museum world (except in Kyoto). This large scale mainly displays a robust assortment of published games across the game industry’s existence. Malaga’s OXO Museo del Videojuego organizes a lot of its exhibits by specific companies. Signage for “Atari,” “Nintendo,” “Neo-Geo,” “Amiga,” “Sega,” and even the obscure and short-lived, “Vectrex” grab my attention after beginning at the Pioneros Del Videojuego exhibition featuring text cards on computer games like OXO, Spacewar!, and even a recreation of Tennis for Two before moving onto Ralph Baer and the Magnavox Odyssey.
Speaking of the Odyssey you’ll see a playable one in Malaga, and you are certain to find it on display in Berlin, Jeju, Shanghai, Paris, and Heraklion (regardless of its market availability in the early 1970s). It usually appears in close proximity to its progenitor, the Brown Box, whose replicas populate the Game On exhibition at Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland (29 June to 3 November 2024) and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. You’ll see a varied assortment of Nintendo’s Game & Watch handhelds in Zagreb and Zoetermeer. A rainbow cascade of different color versions of the Nintendo GameBoy resides in Rome and in Kyoto (you’ll have to take my word on this; photography and voice recorders are forbidden at the Nintendo Museum). PONG derivatives bombard the eye in Riga, Berlin, and Alicante. PlayStation and Xbox consoles stand at attention seemingly everywhere (except in Kyoto……are you starting to have the feeling that I don’t care for the Nintendo Museum?).
Published software titles fill in any cracks. Coin-op machines, set to free play, throw their weight around on exhibition floors the world over. PCs are hooked up to monitors with their keyboards ready to touch.
It may sound like I’m not fond of this approach. I do harbor mixed feelings, or maybe it’s just that I’m jaded from looking at too many Pokemon N64 limited editions, or rare Halo versions of the Xbox. I do need to remind myself that this is what visitors expect from a video game museum. They expect to see and play video games. Being shown so much stuff suggests the longevity of the game industry, its rises and falls, top sellers like the Nintendo Wii alongside lesser knowns like the RCA Studio II, innovative software titles, short-lived controllers, every color variation of the Nintendo GameCube. So much of the same commercial stuff, observed across different museums, allows visitors to reflect on experiences that they’ve had with certain games played. It welcomes nostalgia for many while providing object lessons for others a little younger. And it may show a history not experienced directly but known to many living in, for instance, the Soviet Bloc.
Museums, whether in Shanghai, Vigo, Wrocław, Sheffield, Frisco, Jeju, or Rochester are remiss if they don’t display this scale of anticipated objects to evidence and document the history of games irrespective of whether they were commercially available. Certain representatives of video game history are expected, required. As museums devoted to history, they have a responsibility to the subject, they owe the public a lesson in game history that demands all those Nintendo GameCubes if not perhaps every color pathway. ColecoVisions, Sega Genesis, and PS2s. Oh, and all those PONGS!
Amidst these expectations and desires, along with the responsibilities of museums to represent the history of games faithfully and broadly regardless of local access, my colleague Melanie Swalwell’s Game History and the Local comes to mind. “Game history did not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter.”
Now let’s see, with eyes fully flushed out, how such “particularities” are curated and how “space and place” are made to matter…
End of Part One.
The post <div>Something’s amiss in the US, Part 1</div> appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.
