ICrossing the doors of This exhibitionyou’re immediately greeted by the PDP-10, the gigantic mainframe used to program SpaceWar, considered by all but the most extreme pedants of computer history to be the first recognizable video game. Next to it, to the left, is a working, bright yellow 1972 Pong arcade cabinet. Puck Man (later Pac-Man) and Space Invaders cabinets are side by side, just beyond. These are very familiar sights to anyone with a knowledge of video game history, and they set the tone. If you’re a keen (or, let’s be honest, old) gamer, you’re very unlikely to learn anything new at Game On, but you’ll still have fun.
The Game On exhibition, dedicated to the history of video games, began in 2002 at the Barbican in London and has been touring the world all this time, although it was only closed completely during the Covid-19 pandemic. He arrived for the first time in Edinburgh that same year. Twenty-two years ago I dragged my father to this exhibition; This time I will drag my sons and encourage them to try the now old games that he loved when he was his age. Most importantly, you can play almost everything at this exhibition, from Donkey Kong to Guitar Hero, Farming Simulator and Soulcalibur. One section combines every console in gaming history with a game that defines it, another groups games by genre, and a third is dedicated to multiplayer, with four-player Halo 3 placed around a pillar. There are over 100 games to try and they form a well-curated nostalgia trip, focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the 80s, 90s and 2000s.
The exhibition has changed since 2002, and not just because the games themselves have evolved considerably. Names like Carol Shaw – the first woman to design a commercial video game – and Jerry LawsonThe black engineer who invented the game cartridge did not get the recognition he deserved in previous decades, but is now listed alongside his inventions.
It also reflects a bit of the country it’s travelling through, with frequent references to Scottish games and gaming history. Scotland’s most famous gaming export is, naturally, Grand Theft Auto, and Rockstar has donated a selection of interesting memorabilia from its games, from GTA baseball bats to Red Dead Redemption 2 maps. But other facets of Scotland’s games industry are on show, too: last year’s brilliant A Highland Song, a game about running away from home in the Highlands, is on display alongside other interesting Scottish indie games Viewfinder and Pine Hearts, and thanks to the Scottish-flavoured information panels I now know that the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was partly manufactured in Dundee.
For the first 40 years of video game history, change was driven largely by technology: the giant leaps from 8-bit to 16-bit, from two dimensions to three, from SD to HD, from offline to online. Computers and game consoles, and the speed and beauty with which they could render things on a screen, drove the evolution of the art form, opening up new creative possibilities for developers every few years, starting in the US with MIT programmers and then spreading to Japan and the rest of the world.
That’s the version of gaming history you’ll see at Game On, with every console in gaming history lovingly arranged in an illuminated cabinet, sparking memories. I took the awkward controller of the Dreamcast and remembered hurting my fingers on the triggers from playing Crazy Taxi too much; I admired the brave Y2K ugliness of the original Xbox Crystal Edition, with its translucent plastic, and remembered the transparent green version that lived under the TV in my teenage boyfriend’s attic bedroom. It is an exhibition about the consoles and games that have lived in our homes and where they came from.
However, over the last 10 or 15 years, change in gaming has been driven more by people. The pace of technological change has slowed and what is changing instead is who is making games and why. Different stories are being told as the diversity of game developers, writers and artists has increased. More games are being made about real-life experiences of dementia or Homeless or pain or growingYou won’t see much of that side of gaming here, beyond the small section of relatively indie games from global creators, and a couple of cabinets right at the end that showcase a couple of issue-oriented games (like Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, which tells a story about the drastic effects of deforestation on wildlife through the eyes of a small family of apes).
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It is a very conventional, but fun and complete interactive video game story that puts the focus on the game. You won’t learn much about how these games were created or who created them, but you will be able to play over 100 of them in a fun, family-friendly environment.