Something’s amiss in the US. Part 2

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.