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

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.