Amsterdam's NEMO lets visitors jump from Atari 2600 to PlayStation 5 in one exhibition

NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam welcomes visitors to Game On, an interactive exhibition letting players get hands-on with consoles from the Atari 2600 through PlayStation 5.

NEMO Science Museum's Game On exhibition is open in Amsterdam today, and its approach to gaming history is considerably more hands-on than staring respectfully at an elderly console behind glass. The temporary exhibition explores how video games have changed the way people play, learn, socialise and express themselves, while allowing visitors to actually use machines spanning multiple generations.

Its playable range stretches from systems including the Atari 2600 and Super Nintendo through to PlayStation 5, giving the show a useful historical sweep rather than treating gaming as something that began when polygons acquired enough edges to look respectable. Displays also cover topics such as game technology, cosplay and games as an art form, with multiplayer areas and arcade machines built into the exhibition. Game On runs into late October at NEMO's Oosterdok location and is included with museum admission; listings for September 23 show availability today.

What makes exhibitions like this valuable to retro gaming is context. An Atari 2600 cartridge makes rather more sense when visitors can see what followed it, and a modern console becomes more interesting when positioned as one point in a much longer chain of increasingly ambitious machines. Museums have finally realised what many gamers knew already: if you want somebody to understand an old game, letting them press Start is generally more effective than a paragraph printed in twelve-point Helvetica.