(In reference to a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald.)
Developed by the Barbican Museum in London, Game On examines videogames from the game design process, to the culture among gamers and beyond. Visitors can experience the past forty years of electronic gaming, play over 100 games on their original hardware and using the software that would have been used at the time.
The Game On exhibit has been seen by more than 1 million people and has toured venues such as London's Science Museum, the San Jose Tech Museum, and Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. This display of many of the defining video games from the history of interactive entertainment has now opened at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, Australia.
Stanford University's Henry Lowood, co-director of SHL and a contributor to Game On, is one of the few experts working to preserve video games and their culture. Curator of the university's history of science and technology collection, Professor Lowood has helped assemble a collection of 25,000 games, plus books, hardware, magazines and other gaming artefacts. There are only a handful of other significant public collections of games and gaming hardware in the world, such as those at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Berlin's Computer Games Museum and the Computer History Museum in San Francisco. Stanford University's games collection is open to the public but is restricted to research purposes.