The Collection of the Computerspielemuseum
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The history of the collection began when the museum was founded in 1996 by purchasing video game consoles and complementary accessories at auctions and car boot sales. Afterwards it was mainly focused on acquisitions for special exhibitions contributing to a continuously growing inventory of both software and hardware. Since the opening of the museum in early 1997, however, generous donations from many people have become the most important source for our ever-increasing collection. Individual video game consoles as well as mixed bulk lots comprising as many as thousands of artifacts thus found their way into our archive, which currently boasts of some 25,000 software items (computer games, multimedia applications and operating systems) and roughly 3,500 hardware objects (video game consoles, arcade machines plus accessories).
The objective of the collection
Thanks to this plenitude of donations we have one of the leading collections for digital gaming culture worldwide. This in turn meant that our objectives have diversified over the course of time: Now in addition to presenting our collection to the public and staging special exhibitions at home or abroad we are facing an increased demand for the scientific investigation of our holdings. We have to process requests submitted by professional researchers from areas such as German literature, history of art, media science, musicology and communication sciences as well as from university level students and teachers directly involved in studies relating to the field of computer games .
