The Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow: the phenomenon of the tech-nostalgia
One interesting manifestation of nostalgia for the late Soviet era can be found in the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines (MSAM) in Moscow. This museum was founded in early 2007 by three young engineers from Polytechnic University. The founders of the museum explained their reasons for opening it as part of their nostalgic daydreaming about the late Soviet past, even though they themselves only caught the last years of the Soviet period as very small schoolchildren. These spaces do not look like traditional museums; instead, they combine the aesthetic elements of a video-game arcade hall, a gift shop, and a hip Brooklyn café.
The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines has generated a certain affective ideology, which combines the materialized and emotional experience of actually playing the game on the old Soviet machines with the player's own memories of and associations with the late Soviet period. The majority of visitors either were children or had not yet been born in the 1970s and 1980s. For them the experience is primarily both a mystification of the past and an opportunity for historical nostalgia. Since its founding, the MSAM has held popular lectures on the anthropology of video games, establishing a relatively stable community of those interested in the history and development of the first arcade and computer games.
The arcade machines have physical implements that are both toy like and realistic, such as hunting guns, hard plastic wheels, racing cars with metal pedals for accelerators, and black-rubber submarine periscopes. All these material features make the game seem more real and natural, and, if anything, the regular malfunctions of the old and worn-out arcade machines only add additional charm and naturalness to the game play. Riding an old tank, car, fighter jet, or submarine was hardly an activity devoid of errors and malfunctions. The generation of the internet searches for and finds materiality in these games from another era.
