The next time you go to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art to take in, say, a retrospective of Le Corbusier, you’ll be able to get up close and personal with one of the earliest home consoles ever made. And there’ll be Atari classics and a modern indie juggernaut waiting for you, too.
MoMA has just announced that they’re adding to the Magnavox Odyssey console and six new titles to their already impressive roster of video games.
Today, we are thrilled to announce the addition of one gaming console and six more video games to our collection. These include works from the early pioneers Atari, Taito, and Ralph Baer, and from the comparatively young Mojang. The new additions are:
- Magnavox Odyssey (1972)
- Pong (1972)
- Space Invaders (1978)
- Asteroids (1979)
- Tempest (1981)
- Yar’s Revenge (1982)
- Minecraft (2011)
Now, MoMA isn’t the only museum to harbor games as part of their collections. The Museum of the Moving Image hosted IndieCade East this year, has mounted a few game-centric exhibitions, and has a few arcade machines that greet visitors on its first floor. And, of course, the Smithsonian’s The Art of Video Games made waves for its ambitious look at the visuals of the medium.
But MoMA’s expansion of their games archive shows a firm commitment to exploring and expanding what games can mean to people who don’t keep up with every little development that happens in the medium. It’s a heartening trend.
A quick Google search doesn’t turn up anything for the Musuem of Modern Art being recreated in Minecraft. Surely, someone needs to get on that now, right?
(Original image by Allie Caulfield.)
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