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Tours  /  three ways round

Guided tours of the museum

Pick a route by how long you have. Each stop says where to go and one thing to notice when you get there. Open the links in order, or in a new tab, and come back here between stops.

Ten minutes

Seven short stops for when the bus is due. One idea from each, and you leave knowing why old games looked and felt the way they did.

  1. Lobby, 30 seconds

    The floor plan

    Look at the coloured rail above the hall cards. The bars are different lengths because the eras are: the Early Web gets eight years, the One-Tap years only three.

  2. Hall 1, 2 minutes

    The glass, in the Vector Hall

    A vector screen has no grid at all. Read how the beam is dragged from point to point, and why designers counted their lines the way a poet counts syllables.

  3. Exhibit, 2 minutes

    CRT simulator

    Turn scanlines and glow all the way up, then all the way down. Watch the moment a square pixel turns into a soft dot: that softness is what the artists drew for.

  4. Exhibit, 1 minute

    Cabinet anatomy

    Open the box the screen lived in. Find the coin door, the control panel and the marquee, and notice how much of a cabinet is there to be seen from across a room.

  5. Hall 2, 2 minutes

    The input, in the Golden Arcade

    Four small switches sit under a classic joystick. Read why a player could hear a diagonal, and what the flat cross-shaped pad changed about level design.

  6. Hall 5, 1 minute

    The room, in the Flash Hall

    The arcade became a browser tab. Notice the line about a link being the whole delivery system, and think about the last game a friend sent you.

  7. Hall 8, 1 minute

    The result is a picture, in the Daily Puzzle Hall

    A grid of coloured squares tells your friends how you did without giving away the answer. It is a score table, a story and a spoiler shield in one image.

Thirty minutes

The whole building, oldest first, with one thing to look for in each room and a few toys to try on the way. About two minutes a stop.

  1. Hall 1, 1977–1982

    The Vector Hall

    Read the input section. Notice how few controls there were, and how the drift of a ship after you let go is the whole game.

  2. Hall 2, 1983–1989

    The Golden Arcade

    Sprites and tiles were ways to cheat the cost of memory. Notice how the same few 8 by 8 pieces, repeated, give these games their rhythm.

  3. Exhibit

    Palette toy

    Squeeze the scene into two colours and switch on attribute clash. Watch colour leak across whole blocks, then read the hex values under each swatch.

  4. Hall

    The Home Computers Hall

    Look for what changed when the computer moved into the family living room: a keyboard in front of you, a television as the screen, and games typed in from a magazine.

  5. Exhibit

    Controls

    Compare the controls side by side. Notice which ones report a direction and which report an amount, and which games each kind made possible.

  6. Hall 3, 1990–1996

    The 16-Bit Hall

    Read the train-window paragraph on parallax. Then notice that depth here costs no geometry at all, only layers moving at different speeds.

  7. Hall

    The Handhelds Hall

    Small grey-green screens and a pair of batteries. Notice how the games that worked took the tiny, unlit screen as the starting point rather than a problem.

  8. Exhibit

    Chip Synth

    Play the same few notes through each generation of sound. Listen for the point where a tune stops being a square wave and starts sounding like an instrument.

  9. Exhibit

    Sound design

    Notice how a short sound tells you something happened: a point, a miss, a landing. Try to describe each one in a single word.

  10. Hall 4, 1997–2004

    The Early Web Hall

    A game of 200 kilobytes took most of a minute to arrive. Notice how every design choice in this hall comes back to that wait.

  11. Exhibit

    Dial-up sound room

    Turn the volume down first, then press Dial with the transcript open. Notice that the part that sounds like static is the most careful part of the conversation.

  12. Hall 5, 2005–2011

    The Flash Hall

    Shapes made of curves, not dots. Notice why a drawing could be scaled to any size, and how the glossy button was trying to look like something you could press.

  13. Exhibit

    Loading-bar wing

    Eight ways to dress a wait. Pick the one you would have stayed for, and read the sentence beside it on why that idea existed.

  14. Hall 6, 2012–2014

    The One-Tap Hall

    One control that means jump, grab or let go depending on the moment. Notice how timing turns a single tap into a whole vocabulary.

  15. Hall 7, 2015–2019

    The Indie Pocket Hall

    Read the section on juice. Notice that none of it changes the rules, and all of it changes how the rules feel.

  16. Exhibit

    Pixel Workshop

    Draw something in full colour, then switch to an older era. Notice what your picture keeps and what it has to give up.

  17. Hall 8, 2020–now

    The Daily Puzzle Hall

    One puzzle a day, the same for everybody. Notice why a limit that a business would never choose is part of why people come back.

  18. Wing

    The Revived Wing

    Read why published code is not the same as permission. Notice how one short licence sentence decides whether a game can be kept alive.

  19. Timeline

    The timeline

    Find the year you were born, or the year a grown-up you know was. Read what that year made possible.

For teachers

A route for a single lesson of about forty-five minutes, built around one idea: limits shape design. Each stop has a question to ask out loud. The printable worksheets carry the same idea into each hall.

  1. Lobby, 3 minutes

    Start with the floor plan

    Ask: what do you think changed between 1977 and now? Write the answers on the board and come back to them at the end.

  2. Hall 1, 6 minutes

    A screen with no pixels

    Read the first two paragraphs together. Ask: if every line costs something, what would you leave out of a drawing of a ship? Then compare with the hall.

  3. Hall 2, 6 minutes

    Memory is money

    Read about sprites and tile maps. Ask: why would repeating the same small pieces save money, and where do we still repeat pieces today, in tiles, bricks or fonts?

  4. Exhibit, 6 minutes

    Try the limit

    Project the palette toy. Drop to four colours, then two, with dithering on and off. Ask: from the back of the room, how many colours can you see? How many are really there?

  5. Exhibit, 4 minutes

    Controls

    Ask: which of these controls tells the game how far, not just which way? Match each one to a kind of game.

  6. Hall 4, 5 minutes

    The wait as a design problem

    Read the section called small is the style. Ask: what would you put on screen to keep someone waiting for thirty seconds without getting bored?

  7. Hall 8, 5 minutes

    When the hardware stops saying no

    Read the opening of the hall. Ask: if a modern phone can draw anything, why did the designers of these years choose to be calm and simple?

  8. Wing, 5 minutes

    Who owns a game?

    Read why published code is not permission. Ask: if you made a game and put it online, what would you want other people to be allowed to do with it?

  9. Colophon, 3 minutes

    How do we know?

    Show where the museum’s facts come from and how to send a correction. Ask: how would you check one sentence you read today?

  10. Glossary, 2 minutes

    Words to take away

    Pick five terms the class met on the tour, such as sprite, dithering, palette, parallax and licence, and read their definitions aloud. Then return to the board from the first stop.

Taking a class round

Every hall has a one-page worksheet with five questions, a look-closely task and a make-your-own task. The glossary explains the words the halls use, and the workshop notes show how ten of the games on the floor were designed. Eracade for classrooms explains what the site stores and how it works on a school network.