Special exhibitions
In our exhibits you can experience and interactively discover the history of videogames. You will learn, how it was, when videogames became popular at home, what is being played today and what technology is behind it. We also investigate, what that says about us and our society and how the future of digital gaming might look. Stop by and discover the answers - "replay history".
Screen/Play
Super Mario and Sonic jump and run across the big screen, Indiana Jones discoveres the Fate of Atlantis on the home computer, Podracers race across the living room TV and Pokémon gather on screens of all sizes - movies and videogames have been in a constant exchange for decades and fuel each other. Movie-Blockbuster reference games, videogames use moviescenes and not just the game to the movie, but also the feature film adaptation have outgrown the reputation of a cheap copy.
The Computerspielemuseum dedicates from the 18th of November a special exhibition to this special bond with movies that turned into games, games that became feature films and much more. Sink into the cinema seat and dive into games and movies from all around the world.
Curation: Christian Bachmann und Matej Samide
Project management: Martin Görlich und Nicole Hanisch
Project assistant: Jannis Petersen
Exhibit construction: Melanie Link
Equipment and collages: Christoph Dettmeier
Graphic: Margarita Filipenko
Technical supervision: Matthias Oborski
Technology: Tobias Hermann, Martin Wagner und Federico Lenzi
Archive: Robert Lang, Ayumi Manuela Reichel und Bernhard Beinhölzl
In cooperation with the Filmrauschpalast Moabit.
This exhibition was grant-aided by the VG Bild-Kunst. We thank you very much for this support!
Longing is a desire that is often perceived as downright painful. We long, for example, for another being, for certain objects or places, or even for an idealized state. As an anthropological constant, longing has fascinated people from Plato to Hegel and continues to manifest itself prominently in artistic forms of expression and pop culture.
Start your engines
The large and small donations of our visitors have made it possible for us to purchase a Sega Rally Championship machine (1994) in the twin version for two players. We celebrate the two machines with the special exhibition START YOUR ENGINES on the development of racing game machines.
The interactive special exhibition features four original arcade milestones from the 1980s and 1990s: Pole Position (1982), Super Monaco GP (1989), Crazy Taxi (1999) and Sega Rally Championship (1994) in the two-player version.
We wish you a good ride!
Impact Games
The special exhibition "Impact Games" immerses visitors in a time when computer games conquered our everyday lives. The journey through time leads from video game machines set up in public to home consoles from various decades. In authentically restaged experience rooms, visitors can play themselves the beginnings of our digital information society on original devices.
Living room, late 1970s.
The first home video games were not sold as toys for children, but as adult or family entertainment. Households usually had only one television set in the living room. Therefore, these devices were adapted to the designs common at the time, for example, by using wood veneers.
Hobby room, 1st half of the 1980s.
After Apple (1977) successfully established the first home computer with the Apple II, more and more people began to deal privately with the new technology. Whereas computers had previously only been something for specialists, from now on many more people were able to acquire this new technology. Helped by a rapid drop in prices, home computers spread quickly through households, especially as gaming machines.
Children's room, 2nd half of the 1980s.
Mainly due to the success of the Japanese video game manufacturer Nintendo, the image of video games changed: An amusement for all generations increasingly became a children's toy. This development was supported by the purchase of second televisions for children's rooms and by the successful, mobile, battery-powered gaming devices. Thanks to their simplicity, these devices were so inexpensive that even children could buy them with their pocket money.
Living room, mid-1990s.
In the mid-1990s, we find the next milestone. With the CD-ROM, an optical data carrier reached production maturity that could store many times the amount of data than the standard data carriers of the time. For the first time, entire film sequences and complex soundtracks could be packed into a game. So it was only logical that the space in the living room came back into focus and video game consoles were marketed as multi-media devices.
