Retro Game Museums in Switzerland: A Tour of Kindred Spirits

The Game Boy Museum is a private online museum. Every cartridge, console, and curio in our collection lives on the web, which means you can browse it from anywhere in the world without ever leaving the couch. That is wonderful for reach, and it is the whole point of what we do, but it also means you never quite get to press a real d-pad or hear the satisfying click of a physical power switch. Switzerland, happily, is full of places where you can do exactly that, and we love pointing people toward them.

We think of these institutions as kindred spirits. They preserve the same history we care about, only with cabinets you can walk around and controllers you can actually hold. Where we curate pixels and photographs, they curate rooms full of glowing screens and the unmistakable hum of old hardware warming up. If our online galleries whet your appetite, here are three Swiss museums well worth a real-world visit, each one an easy train ride away.

Gameorama, Lucerne

Gameorama in Lucerne is a hands-on playground that runs across the entire sweep of gaming history. Instead of roping everything off behind glass, it invites you to sit down and play, from early arcade cabinets and pinball tables to the home consoles that quietly defined whole childhoods. It is the sort of place where a quick look becomes a five-hour marathon, and nobody minds one bit.

Gameorama, Lucerne - Warning: contains playable nostalgia and mild thumb fatigue.

Musee Bolo, Lausanne

Musee Bolo sits inside EPFL in Lausanne and takes the broadest view of them all. Its focus is computing and digital-culture preservation, tracing the machines that shaped how we work, play, and think, from room-sized pioneers to the home computers that landed on kitchen tables. Alongside the calculators and mainframes you will find the game systems that grew out of that same silicon lineage, which makes it a genuinely fascinating companion to a Game Boy collection.

Musee Bolo, Lausanne - Glass cases optional, actual buttons very much included.

GamePlaza, Zurich

GamePlaza in Zurich is an interactive video game museum only a few tram stops from the city center. It leans fully into the joy of playing, with stations spanning generation after generation of consoles, handhelds, and arcade hardware. If you are already in Zurich for the day, it is an easy and very rewarding detour, and a lovely way to see how far games have travelled.

GamePlaza, Zurich - Swiss precision meets a perfectly timed A-button jump.

Go See Them in Person

We have also told the wider Swiss Game Boy story ourselves. Our Around the World: Switzerland feature traces how Nintendo's little grey handheld found its way into Swiss hands and hearts, and it pairs nicely with a visit to any of the museums above. Read it first and the display cases suddenly have a few more stories tucked inside them.

So treat this as a small itinerary. Browse the Game Boy Museum online to plan what you would most like to see, then go press some real buttons in Lucerne, Lausanne, and Zurich. Some history is best experienced from the couch, and some is best experienced with a controller warm in your hands. These three kindred spirits are firmly in the second category, and we could not recommend them more.