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The World's First: Inside the Computerspielemuseum Berlin

Marcel Pflug

Sep 9

2 min read

Some museums preserve a niche. A few preserve the whole medium. The Computerspielemuseum in Berlin belongs firmly to the second kind, and it got there first: in 1997 it opened the world's first permanent exhibition dedicated to digital interactive culture.

Computerspielemuseum Berlin, the world's first computer games museum — The Computerspielemuseum, Berlin: where the whole history of the medium is on display.

We wanted to feature it, because a house that documents the entire sweep of gaming is the perfect counterpart to an archive like ours, which goes deep on a single machine.

A Computer Games Museum in the Heart of Berlin

The Computerspielemuseum is a computer games museum in Berlin, on Karl-Marx-Allee 93a, open every day from 10 to 20. Its permanent exhibition, 'Computerspiele. Evolution eines Mediums', opened in 2011 and is continuously renewed; more than 300 exhibits fill an interactive landscape you are invited to play as much as read.

The museum's pedigree is hard to overstate. It opened the first permanent exhibition of its kind anywhere in 1997, has staged more than 40 national and international exhibitions since, and was honoured in 2017 with a special jury prize at the Deutscher Computerspielpreis.

Computerspielemuseum Berlin
Computerspielemuseum Berlin
Computerspielemuseum Berlin
Computerspielemuseum Berlin

A Collection That Spans the Medium

Behind the exhibition sits a genuinely vast collection, built up over more than 27 years and drawn from the holdings of the fjs e.V. As of 2022 it counted over 35,000 original data carriers with games and software, more than 350 different consoles and computer systems, and over 12,000 magazines, alongside arcade systems, literature, media-art objects, archival material, merchandise and video.

This is preservation taken seriously. The Computerspielemuseum is a co-founder and member of EFGAMP, the European federation of game archives and museums, and a member of both ICOM and the Deutscher Museumsbund.

Preserving the Digital, Which Is Harder Than It Sounds

Keeping digital works alive is not like hanging a painting on a wall. Software depends on hardware that ages and disappears, so long-term digital archiving is a research problem in its own right. The museum has been a partner in European and national projects on exactly this question, and it holds itself to formal standards of good scientific and ethical practice, including the ICOM code and UNESCO guidelines on cultural property.

Breadth Meets Depth

This is where our paths cross. The Computerspielemuseum holds the wide context of the whole medium; the Game Boy Museum goes exhaustively deep on a single device within it. Breadth and depth, the general survey and the specialist archive: together they tell a fuller story than either could alone, and both are part of a growing network devoted to gaming heritage. If it leaves you curious about one machine in particular, you can follow the whole original Game Boy story in our complete DMG-01 guide.

Plan Your Visit

The Computerspielemuseum is at Karl-Marx-Allee 93a in Berlin and is open daily from 10 to 20, with reduced admission for young people, families, the unemployed and school groups. You will find tickets, current special exhibitions and visitor information at computerspielemuseum.de. Give yourself a couple of hours, and do not be surprised how much of the history you can actually play.