Where Switzerland Keeps Its Digital Memory: The Musee Bolo in Lausanne

Switzerland's gaming heritage does not live in one place. It is spread across a handful of dedicated houses, and one of the most important sits inside a university building in Lausanne. The Musee Bolo has spent decades saving the machines that carried us into the digital age, video games very much included.

It is a different kind of museum from the arcades and play-floors elsewhere in the country, and a perfect companion to a single-subject archive like ours.

Musee Bolo - Protecting Switzerland's gaming heritage

A Computer and Video Game Museum in Lausanne

The Musee Bolo is Switzerland's museum of computing, digital culture and video games, hosted by the EPFL in Lausanne. Run by the non-profit Memoires Informatiques foundation and kept alive almost entirely by volunteers, it has grown into one of the most significant computing museums in Europe, and a member of the Association of Swiss Museums. Entry is free, and the museum is open to the public on weekdays.

Its collections span the short but dense history of the machine on your desk: computers and games consoles, software and video games, and the books, journals and magazines that grew up around them. Swiss stories feature strongly, from home-grown machines to the pioneers who built them.

Where Video Games Meet Computing History

What makes Bolo interesting for anyone who loves games is that it refuses to separate them from the broader story. A console sits in the same lineage as the computers before it, and a video game is treated as software worth preserving. The museum's permanent and temporary exhibitions move between the two freely, and its 'Memoires vives' series of articles and portraits digs into the people and ideas behind the hardware.

That framing turns a visit into something more than nostalgia. You come away seeing the Game Boy, the home computer and the arcade cabinet as chapters of one continuous history rather than separate curiosities.

Kept Alive by Volunteers

Bolo runs on passion rather than big budgets. The Memoires Informatiques foundation, a circle of friends of the museum and a steady stream of donated objects keep the collection growing and the machines in working order. It is preservation in the most hands-on sense, people giving their time so that fragile technology survives another generation.

It is a model worth admiring, and supporting. Museums like this carry a slice of cultural history that no company is obliged to keep.

Broad Heritage, Deep Specialists

This is where our paths cross. The Musee Bolo preserves the wide sweep of computing and digital culture; the Game Boy Museum goes exhaustively deep on a single device within it. Breadth and depth, the general and the specialist: together they tell a fuller story than either could alone.

It is also part of a bigger picture. Between Bolo in Lausanne, kindred museums in Zurich and Lucerne and online archives like ours, Switzerland has the makings of a real network devoted to gaming and computing heritage, across its regions and languages. If Bolo 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 Musee Bolo is at the EPFL, Batiment INF, Station 14, in Lausanne, and admission is free. It is generally open on weekdays, with weekends closed, and it occasionally shuts for renovation work, so it is worth checking before you travel. Guided tours led by the volunteer team are the best way to see it.

You will find opening hours, current exhibitions and visit bookings at museebolo.ch. Give yourself time, and pay attention to the Swiss machines in particular. Some of them shaped more of the digital world than their modest looks suggest.