Video Game Museum

         I went to the Video Game Museum "Vigamus" in Rome. It is in the basement of a office building, you wouldn't know it except for the 20' x 10' poster above the door. When you get to the bottom of the stairs, you enter a different atmosphere.  There is a small prrrrr from the fans of the electronics all around. The smell isn't the musky odor that you would expect from a basement. I buy my ticket and I head through the entrance, not without being visited by 3 different life size statues of video game characters.  I am also greeted by glass cabinets full of what would seem to most people as old electronics and junk. What is really there is the start of video games. The video games was created by accident. William Higinbotham, an American Physicist, in 1958 was using a computer to make ballistic calculations with the help of an oscilloscope. It was on display at Brookheaven National Labrotory to create an attraction for bored visitors.

         The first real videogame was created by an MIT student, Steve Russell, with the help of the PDP-1 computer. This game was soon to be known as Spacewar! Steve and his club memebers determined there would be no commercial value of it.

          Throughout the museum there are many more exhibits and posters that chronologically lead us to modern day gaming. such as information on Atari and Nintendo. There is also a mention of the foundations for Pac Man and some of the first floppy disks from the first, first person shooter game Doom.

         If you continue to the next room, there is a special exhibit of a mystery in New Mexico.  In 1983, Atari supposedly dumped warehouses full of video games and consoles into a dump after finical crisis after the release of the game E.T. . The dump was soon-after sold to a different owner. He eventually heard of these rumors and looked into them. He learned that Atari did indeed dump something there and they covered it in concrete. so in 2013 the dump owner was able to get permission to excavate the area. The excavation turned into an archeological dig for video games. in the end, only about 1,300 of the estimated 700,000 copies were found.