For young people used to playing at home, perhaps online with friends, arcades are a nostalgic image seen in many movies and television series. Yet these noisy and colorful places for a generation were not only a place for recreation, but an important moment of aggregation and growth. Saving the history of arcade video games kept in thematic museums, especially after the advent of the pandemic and the closure of these institutions, has become an urgency.
A fundraiser
It is called Saving The Arcade World the campaign launched in the trade magazine EDGE gives Team 17, English developer and publisher, famous for making the video game series in the 1990s Worms. Fundraising is urgent and serves to finance targeted conservation programs for coin-op boxes kept in three major thematic museums: The Strong National Museum of Play a Rochester, New York; the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield and the Museum of Arcade Vintage Video Game in Alicante, Spain.
The Saving The Arcade World campaign will donate part of the proceeds from the sale of the pixel-art action game Narita Boy of Studio Koba, the rights to publish one of the game’s music tracks and those of the sale of an arcade cabinet.
Why it is important to preserve the heritage of themed museums
Arcades have been a key part in video game history, as Jon-Paul Dyson, vice president of The Strong museum recalled, those places came at a pivotal time in the growth of the video game industry.
Arcade coin-ops were the primary way people could experience the gaming experience in the 1970s and early 1980s.Furthermore, the arcades were much more powerful than the home systems marketed at the time. The Nintendo Entertainment System, NES, the console that revived the video game industry after the 1983 crisis and opened the golden age of 8-bit home consoles, debuted in Japan in the same year, but was not marketed in the USA. and Europe before 1985.
Right now all the themed museums face the problem of the deterioration of numerous arcade machines which is reaching critical levels. Maintenance requires knowledge in different areas, starting from electronics to get to DIY. Museums must therefore balance the need to keep the machines reliable for public use, with the preservation of the authenticity of the hardware.
The ultimate goal is to give visitors a realistic experience of the arcade, immerse them in the typical atmosphere of the time, with retro music and the great videogame classics of the time, because as Jon-Paul Dyson says: “There is a magic in the original “. A magic that no home emulator can ever have.
What is being done
Currently, the National Videogame Museum is conducting a research program focused on arcade sound recording that involves the development of a library with oral histories. The project, called VHS Tapes, makes use of emulators for thematic exhibitions, such as the one on the bonus phases, allowing visitors immediate access, for example, to the iconic sequence of destruction of cars with fists in Street Fighter II.
The Sheffield museum is thinking about conservation practices, creating a community of academics, curators, researchers and video game collectors, to formulate and disseminate an internationally valid guide. Unfortunately, during the pandemic year, many employees of the National Videogame Museum were put on leave and the institution is focusing on raising funds. Around £ 20,000 has already been raised, donated by collectors and industry companies including Rockstar, Jagex and Boneloaf. A start to avoid that such an important heritage in the history of video games is remembered only in films, TV series, with emulators or private collections.
