computer game museum

Spread over 670 square metres (7,000 square feet), it charts the history of computer games and gaming consoles from Nimrod to the latest 3D extravaganzas. Nostalgia-seekers will delight at old arcade classics like Pac-Man, Asteroids or Space Invaders, while the museum also houses a colossal range of both hardware and software.

From the iconic 1975 video console Pong, through prototype Apple machines and Commodore 64s to early PlayStations, anyone who has ever played computer games will recognise an old friend.


Visitors also get to play some of the classic games that shaped the history of the genre, such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Brothers, through to the more recent Grand Theft Auto IV. "We may not be the biggest museum in the world devoted to video games, but we do believe we are the most complete," Lange said, showcasing both the games and the machines that played them. But the museum is not just for old video game romantics.

It also charts more recent developments in gaming technology, through the motion-sensitive revolution sparked by the Wii console to futuristic 3D driving games. East Germany also had its Pac-Man, but although it took exactly the same form, the communist state's only multi-game arcade console, Poly Play, could not use the same characters employed in the "decadent" West.

Near the Poly Play is a quote from an East German psychologist: "Computer games allow the ideas and values of socialism to be conveyed to children by means of play and fable."

Video games have also been in the vanguard of technological development. In the early days of computer technology, one of the first puzzles programmers tried to crack was to teach machines to play chess. But no matter how far mankind advances, it will need insider knowledge to get one over on Nimrod, the original and to many, still the best.