If you want to see arcade and video game history properly preserved and interpreted rather than just collected in someone’s garage, a handful of dedicated museums around the country have made that their entire mission — and a couple of them are genuinely worth planning a trip around.
The Strong National Museum of Play
Located in Rochester, New York, The Strong is home to the World Video Game Hall of Fame, established in 2015 to formally recognize games with lasting cultural, technical, or industry significance. Inductees since its founding include Pac-Man, Tetris, Sonic the Hedgehog, DOOM, and Pong — chosen the same way any hall of fame selects its class, through nominations and a panel vote. The museum also houses the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG), which maintains an extensive research archive of hardware, software, and industry documents rather than just playable cabinets.
The American Classic Arcade Museum
Housed inside Funspot in Laconia, New Hampshire — which itself holds a Guinness World Record as the largest operating arcade in the world — the American Classic Arcade Museum preserves and displays hundreds of classic cabinets, virtually all kept in playable condition rather than behind glass. It’s arguably the single best place in the country to actually sit down and play a genuinely comprehensive cross-section of golden-age hardware in one visit.
The National Videogame Museum
Based in Frisco, Texas, this museum takes a broader console-and-computing view of gaming history rather than focusing narrowly on arcade cabinets, tracing the medium from early home computing through modern consoles, with an emphasis on hands-on exhibits.
The Pinball Hall of Fame
Run in Las Vegas by longtime collector Tim Arnold, the Pinball Hall of Fame is less a traditional museum and more a working showroom — every machine is set to play, typically for a modest fee, and proceeds benefit the Salvation Army. It’s an unusual and genuinely admirable model: rather than roping off history, Arnold’s approach treats playability itself as the preservation method, arguing that a pinball machine nobody can touch is already halfway to being forgotten.
The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE)
A smaller, volunteer-run nonprofit in Oakland, California, MADE focuses specifically on preserving playable game history with an emphasis on community access and education, running a working arcade floor alongside its archival mission.
Why This Matters Beyond Nostalgia
- Arcade-grade CRT monitors haven’t been manufactured in nearly two decades, making every working original tube a genuinely finite resource these institutions have to actively maintain.
- ROM chips and PCBs degrade over time, meaning museum-grade preservation work often overlaps directly with the technical restoration skills discussed throughout this hobby.
- These institutions frequently work with or feed research to organizations like the Video Game History Foundation, connecting hobbyist-level collecting to serious academic and historical documentation.
Whether you’re planning a genuine pilgrimage or just want to understand what “properly preserved” looks like versus a garage full of unplugged cabinets, these museums are the best reference point in the country for how this history deserves to be treated.