Game Masters: Game On

“Video games can never be art,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert in 2006. Game Masters, an exhibition exploring the artistic and cultural capital of forty years of gaming history, which makes its European debut at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh this month, begs to disagree.  Featuring over one hundred games, original artwork and interview footage with some of the industry’s leading lights, Game Masters documents gaming’s evolution from niche hobby into the economic and cultural force that it is today.

Ben Cram, the exhibition’s coordinator, describes the difficulties his team faced in conveying the richness of gaming’s cultural legacy, “With a forty year history, it was a real challenge to represent such a broad medium in just over one hundred games,” he confesses. “Primarily we wanted to represent the most important and ground-breaking titles, from the very first cooperative game – the 1980 arcade shooter Rip Off – to Super Mario Bros., to Singstar, which redefined karaoke games for the mass audience.”

Remarkably for its breadth and scope, all of the games in the exhibition are playable on their original hardware. The interactive nature of gaming presents unique challenges when transposed from arcade or living room to museum exhibition and so it was critical that all titles could be played by visitors. As Cram acknowledges, “Video games are not a static art form, in isolation they are incomplete without a player to participate in driving the experience forward."

Sourcing the hardware for some titles was a challenge for Cram and his team, with some rare arcade cabinets proving particularly difficult to track down and restore to working condition. The fate of many original cabinets speaks volumes about the extent video games have previously been regarded as throwaway cultural artefacts. “Back in the 80s, many of the original arcade cabinets were either discarded or stripped out and modified to accommodate newer games,” Cram notes. “Finding an original Missile Command is no easy task.” 

“Video games are not a static art form, in isolation they are incomplete without a player to participate“ – Ben Cram

While the Game Masters exhibition focuses on playable titles from four decades of gaming history, it also lifts the lid on some of the personalities who have shaped the evolution of the medium. Shigeru Miyamoto, the mastermind behind Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda series features heavily but so too do figures less known such as Ed Logg (Asteroids and Centipede) and Warren Spector (System Shock and Deus Ex). “In the 80s and 90s, most games were made by groups of less than ten people,” says Cram. “Back then each designer had a strong voice and pursued the game they wanted to make. It was a craft of passion and personality.”

Though the exhibition has a clear academic and documentary grounding, it’s also apparent that some of the titles on display have a deep personal significance for the team who worked on it. Cram names 1980s arcade shooter Defender as one his favourite games in the exhibition and his enthusiasm for it perfectly captures the way that video games have broadened the horizons of millions of people around the world. “It completely blew my mind that you could fly this spaceship across your own TV screen,” he marvels. “The graphics were simple, but back then it was all high technology, it felt like the future had arrived.”

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