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The Almighty Buck Games

America's First Video Game Museum Is Trying To Level Up 51

martiniturbide writes: Did you ever dreamed of a Museum where you can take your kid and show him/her what you used to play when young? This museum exists and it is called "The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE)" in Oakland, California. This is non-profit videogame museum that preserves old games, has playable exhibitions, give free classes to learn to code using Scratch and host several kinds of gaming events. This museum has over 5,000 games and over 100 consoles and computers and hosted free classes for more than 400 students. Now they are launching a Kickstarter campaign because they need a bigger space.
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America's First Video Game Museum Is Trying To Level Up

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  • by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @01:40PM (#50534705)

    >> Did you ever dreamed of a Museum where you can take your kid and show him/her what you used to play when young?

    No, I have YouTube, emulators and in some cases, the actual consoles and games I used to play.

    • I think the appeal that museums like this would provide is the old style arcade cabinets, physical console devices (including much maligned yet now rare devices like ROB) and other accessories that can't be had from an emulator or a youtube clip.

      One thing that they might also be able to provide, is the old 80's style arcades, maybe even 90's style (not much difference other than better graphics.) Sure, modern arcades exist, but they aren't quite the same atmosphere that was found back then.

      Again, if you wan

      • I think the appeal that museums like this would provide is the old style arcade cabinets, physical console devices (including much maligned yet now rare devices like ROB) and other accessories that can't be had from an emulator or a youtube clip.

        There's appeal to that? I remember them smelling bad (like burnt caps) and being full of a whole shitload of dust, which also smelled bad and to which I'm allergic. Still went to them a lot anyway, because video games, man. Attic arcade in Soquel. The SC Beach Boardwalk obviously still has a pretty great arcade, with a nice mix of new and older games.

        To me, the only real reason to go to an arcade as an adult is if your favorite game doesn't emulate properly, and is too expensive to track down, and/or you do

      • I think a fun project to get a young kid interested in technology would be to build an arcade cabinet yourself. There's a lot of how-to guides out there even if you're not the most technical person yourself and it's the kind of project that combines both software and hardware (even more so if you build that cabinet frame from scratch as well) aspects that can get kids interested in all kinds of different stuff.

        Eight-year-old me thought arcades were really cool and would have been stoked to built an arcad
    • What about a museum where the blind can "see" and interact with the art? https://vimeo.com/137003139 [vimeo.com] (video of blind people experiencing visual art)
  • by Anonymous Coward

    No, because I have managed to master at least the basic fundamentals of English grammar...

  • It's called a nickel arcade. Vintage arcade machines for a nickel per play.
  • by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @01:47PM (#50534771)

    although I wouldn't exactly call it a museum, I'd call it a fucking leech, it costs a fucking fortune to get in (£9 for a non-member!) and half the "exhibits" are either hand-off or locked in demo mode, or nonfunctional. In fact I was so disappointed in it when I went last month I won't even bother linking the website.

  • ... Now they are launching a Kickstarter campaign because they need a bigger space.

    No, they don't need a "bigger" space; they just need to recreate themselves within the worlds which they celebrate. That is to say, create a virtual museum using the Unreal Engine, and then release it on every platform that supports UE. You'd be guaranteed to increase your audience dramatically.

    To wit: eat your own dog food, as they say.

    • I can build them a nice place in Second Life.

      • I can build them a nice place in Second Life.

        Go for it. I'm sure they'd be thrilled at a pro-bono offer of development expertise and time, regardless of which engine you happen to prefer.

        ..... What? Not what you had in mind?

  • by RumGunner ( 457733 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @01:54PM (#50534833) Homepage

    It's called "my closet".

    I bet a lot of other people on here do as well.

    • by zlives ( 2009072 )

      its time to come out of the closet...

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Did you ever dreamed of taking your kid into the closet and show him/her what you used to play when young?

    • I did, but I got tired of dragging around consoles I wasn't using. I used to have about nine of them hooked up at once with all their little switchboxes and whatnot, stretching back to the VCS, Coleco, and Intellivision... Now I have just a Saturn (can't emulate it faithfully) and a couple of Playstations and a couple copies of WOXL, some light gun games, etc. One CRT to connect that stuff to. And all that crap's days are numbered. I haven't switched any of it on in years.

  • Son, we used to pay money for this crap. Per play.

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @01:56PM (#50534855)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:03PM (#50534921)

    They have tens of thousands of dollars worth of rare videogame stuff in a walk-up in Oakland and they haven't been robbed??

    Shit, I'm impressed! KUDOS!

  • The might want to level up their website host as well.

  • Or you could just show them the games using an emulator...
  • Did you ever dreamed that hm you had um you would you can you do you want uh you can do some you do um you want it so much that you can do anything - like proper word usage down?
  • by russbutton ( 675993 ) <russ@@@russbutton...com> on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @03:00PM (#50535381) Homepage

    Just across the estuary, in the city of Alameda, is the High Scores Interactive Arcade Museum. They've been there for over 2 years now.

    http://www.highscoresarcade.co... [highscoresarcade.com]

    Very cool joint.

  • This isn't anything new. I went to a video game exhibit a few years ago at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. The exhibit was called Game On 2.0 [ontariosciencecentre.ca] It was a history of video games, and had over 500 playable games. Ranging from Pong to Call of Duty. It was a lot of fun if you still don't have the system as all the games were on the real consoles and controllers, not emulation. Some of the PC games were emulated via Dosbox (Doom, Dune 2, Commander Keen etc,) understandably.

  • There was a club in Toronto who was offering every console to have come out to that day and every personal computer platform that had been popular in Canada.
    They went under because people simply were not interested in the early 90s in vintage games.

    I had the same problem in Montreal when I was building my collection to start exactly the same concept 2 years earlier, I never got off the ground so I personally cannot have the claim. Just curious since I had not heard of anyone else trying the concept back th

    • The "Computerspielemuseum" (video game museum) in Berlin has been around since 1997. It's quite cool, and they have everything from early arcade machines to modern stuff. They claim that they were the first with a permanent exhibition worldwide.

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