Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, Video game museum in Oakland, United States
The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment is an art museum in downtown Oakland, California, dedicated to video game history and digital media as an art form. It holds a large collection of playable consoles, arcade machines, and digital artworks spread across several rooms.
The museum was founded in 2010 as a small collection focused on the history of video games and early digital art. Over the following years it moved several times and settled in its current home in downtown Oakland in 2022.
The museum treats video games as a form of art alongside painting or sculpture, giving them the same kind of serious attention. Visitors can sit down and play titles from different decades, which makes the experience feel active rather than passive.
The museum is located in downtown Oakland, a short walk from a BART station, so getting there by public transit is straightforward. Allow at least half a day if you want to try out the playable exhibits and take part in any workshops.
The museum is one of the few places in the world that actively preserves playable software and hardware, rather than just displaying them behind glass. Many of the pieces in the collection were donated by private collectors who had nowhere else to send them.
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