Where Games Stay Switched On: A guide to the Video Game Museums Worth Visiting

I run a very small and insignificant museum that does not have a building. The Game Boy Museum lives online, which lets me show you an item from every angle and never once let you hold it. That is the one thing a website cannot give you, and it is exactly the thing video game muesums do better than anyone. So I keep an eye out for new ones and check in on the ones I already know, because those are the places where gaming history is not sealed behind glass but switched on, warm and waiting for a go. This is the guide I wish I had when I started, a tour of the ones worth the trip and what each of them does better than the rest.

A grey plastic brick means something different the moment you can press the buttons. You can read every specification on this site, but you will never be able to experience how a room full of Game Boys chirping at once feel, or watch a child meet Tetris for the first time.

Almost every place below runs on the real hardware rather than an emulator on a flat modern screen, and that is the whole point. I have grouped them by where they are, starting at home.

Switzerland, where this museum is based

The Game Boy Museum is run from Zurich, and Switzerland turned out to be quietly rich in places that take play seriously. A few walking minutes from my desk, GamePlaza lets you actually play through gaming history rather than read articles about it. Over in Lucerne, Gameorama does the same across the full breadth of the video game history. And at the EPFL in Lausanne, the Musee Bolo keeps the wider history of computing and digital culture, the machines the Game Boy grew up alongside. I gathered the three of them into a short tour of their own if you want to build a weekend around them.

Germany, the deepest bench

No country in Europe has more to show. The Computerspielemuseum in Berlin opened in 1997 as the world's first museum dedicated to games, and it is still the broadest single room you can walk into. In Hannover, HI-SCORE is the country's largest interactive video game museum, which means almost everything on show is there to be played.

Karlsruhe has the oldest public arcade exhibition in the land: the volunteer-run RetroGames e.V. has been on free play, no coins needed, since 2002. And in Munich, Videospielkultur e.V. preserves more than eleven thousand games across fifty years of history, and runs Germany's oldest games night to go with them.

Austria, where games are treated as culture

Vienna makes the argument out in the open. Since 2004, SUBOTRON has been a shop, a stage and a lecture series in the heart of the MuseumsQuartier, the place the German-speaking scene goes to talk seriously about where games came from and where they are headed. It is proof that a game museum does not have to be a warehouse of hardware to matter.

Across the Channel and the Atlantic

Two more are worth the longer journey. In Sheffield, the National Videogame Museum inverts the usual rule: most museums ask you to keep your hands off the exhibits, and this one asks the opposite. And in Rochester, New York, The Strong and its International Center for the History of Electronic Games hold the largest collection of its kind anywhere, the scale a single collector with a shelf can only dream about.

The archives, where preservation gets serious

Some of this work happens well away from the public floor. One museum is racing to save entire virtual worlds before their servers switch off for good, which is the one kind of game that disappears completely the moment nobody is looking. And the whole field is held together by EFGAMP, the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects, which the Game Boy Museum is proud to have joined as a supporting member. These are the people making sure the next thirty years still has something left to show.

If you only have time for one, pick the nearest. The point of every place on this list is the same, and it is the point of this whole museum: games are meant to be played, and history is a great deal easier to love when you can hold it in your hands.