Visited the National Video Game Museum for the first time. It’s located in Zoetermeer in The Netherlands. The museum is focused on giving you the ultimate player experience, there are a lot of systems and cabinets setup for playing. Surrounding an area filled with free to play arcade machines are different (bed)rooms from different areas.

My son and I started in the seventies with an Atari 2600 and Vectrex. It was maybe the first time I played on an actual 2600 since I was a kid. My sister had one. I think I might have played on a Vectrex before at an event, but can’t really remember. This time they had Asteroids running, which was cool because there were also three arcade cabinets in the room, Pong (which we also played), Asteroids, and Space Invaders (also played). They clearly wanted to show the transition from the arcade to the home. And yes, there was a display case with home Pong machines. Playing one of those at a friend’s birthday party is probably my earliest memory of playing a video game.

The next room over had a NES running Mario and the next after that an Amiga 1200 running IK+. We set down to play it for a while. There was only one joystick though. Bit of a miss there. In the next room.

In another room they had a beautiful C64 setup on which I played Commando, while my son was playing Rainbow Islands on an Amiga 500. In the same room there were two HP T5720 thin clients running DOS games. This reminded me that I need to get the one I have properly setup. In some display cabinets were other home computers, like a Sharp lugable that my best friend’s dad had being a salesman for Sharp. Sadly they didn’t have a MX700. My friend had one of those and that’s probably the first memory I have of playing computer games. There was also a Commodore PET there on which I typed a 10 print hello. 20 goto 10 script. And there are more rooms.

In the middle space, between the rooms, is the arcade section. We played some older titles, like Pengo, Donkey Kong, Lady Bug and Centipede (some favorites of mine from the Commodore 64, although Lady Bug was called Lady Tut), as well as Galaga (sadly I saw no Galaxian cabinet.)

And some newer titles, like OutRun 2, Time Crisis 2 (those guns get heavy with longer free to play sessions) and Star Wars Racer. Next to that was an OutRun sit-down cabinet! Sadly there was no Super Hang-On machine (I remember seeing one of those in my local arcade in the 80s.)

Downstairs was a Japanese arcade exposition with a lot of machines. Mostly shoot-em ups and fighting games. We played a dance game, but also some Street Fighter 2 Turbo, X-Men and Mortal Kombat.

We spend over two hours there and could have easily doubled that. But it was time to go. But not before having a refreshing drink in the Barcade area. There was a Pac-man exposition there, as well as an appropriate Tapper game among others, so we spend another thirty minutes there.

All in all, it was a great experience and I’m glad that we have such a museum.