A painting can survive centuries if protected. A console fights time on entirely different terms.
As founder of the Video Games Museum, one question has followed me since the very first day of this project: why do video games need their own institutionalized preservation, separate from every other art form or technology already housed in museums? The more time I spend on this question, the more complex the answer turns out to be. A painting, if properly protected from light and humidity, can survive for centuries. A video game console fights time on completely different terms, and that's something very few people outside our field ever realize.
Physical preservation: a race against time
Our mission at the museum splits into two core pillars. The first is physical preservation, consoles, cartridges, controllers, and every other physical object tied to the history of gaming. The second, equally critical, is recognizing that these objects present unique challenges compared to traditional museum artifacts, precisely because they represent an art form that evolves at an unusually fast pace.
Technological obsolescence is perhaps the biggest challenge we face daily. Plastics age and become brittle, anyone who has held a very old console knows that distinctive, almost chalky feel of the casing. Circuits degrade over time, and capacitors that have spent decades inside a machine can leak and destroy entire boards, a phenomenon well known in retro electronics restoration circles. Older systems face leaks and malfunctions, while finding genuine replacement parts grows harder by the year, many are no longer manufactured anywhere in the world. Restoration demands specialized knowledge, often combining electronics engineering with historical research, while environmental factors like high humidity and extreme temperatures can irreversibly destroy rare objects within just a few months of poor storage. That's why proactive conservation and regular inspection are, for us, non-negotiable, we don't wait for something to break before we take care of it.
A painting can survive centuries. A console fights time on entirely different terms.
The digital dimension: when an entire world can disappear
Beyond the physical dimension, there's the digital one, which comes with its own, equally complex challenges. Many older games are now incompatible with modern systems, making emulation necessary to access them, software that simulates an old console's operation on modern hardware, so a game can still be played even if the original machine no longer works.
Even more dramatic is the case of online-only titles, especially MMORPGs, which lose all functionality the moment their servers go offline, erasing entire digital worlds along with the experiences of millions of players. We're not just talking about a game that stops working; we're talking about entire communities, economies, and stories that vanish overnight, with no physical trace left behind, no cartridge, no box, nothing to hold in your hands and say "this existed."
On top of this, legal issues further complicate archiving efforts, as copyright restrictions create a genuine legal gray area. A museum can't simply copy and distribute a game just because it believes it holds historical value; it has to navigate a rights framework that was rarely designed with preservation in mind. I believe deeply that digital preservation is vital to safeguarding this cultural heritage, and that we need effective strategies so future generations retain access to gaming history.
How we organize a collection like this
To address these challenges systematically, we developed a complete Collections Management System at the museum. It includes an intake form for every new object entering the collection, physical description, documentation through media, movement tracking, where an object was, where it moved to, who handled it, relevant research into its provenance and historical significance, and a full record of every change or restoration intervention performed on it.
This system supports building an ontology based on the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (ISO 21127:2023), the international standard used by museums worldwide to document their cultural heritage. It mattered to us to follow the same rigorous standards used by established international institutions, so our effort wouldn't operate as an amateur hobby, but with the same seriousness one would expect from an art or natural history museum. Loving the objects you collect isn't enough, you have to document them in a way that will let someone, fifty years from now, understand exactly what they're holding and why it matters.
The objects we keep at the Video Games Museum aren't just old electronics; they're witnesses to a technological and artistic revolution that happened right in front of us, one that risks being lost if we don't work systematically to preserve it. That, in the end, is the whole point of a video game museum: not nostalgia for a bygone era, but responsibility toward an era worth remembering correctly.
