Soviet Arcade Museum in Moscow
During a trip to Moscow in October 2014, I was lucky to discover and visit the Soviet Arcade Museum. It’s now pretty much my favorite museum of all time and is probably just one of the best places and/or things anywhere anyever. I hope I’m not underselling it.
You walk up to it and this is what you see:
The cars on the garage doors are a reference to a popular arcade cabinet called Magistral, or Freeway in English. Naturally, the Museum being as awesome as it is, they have a fully functioning cabinet there:
(Note the cool dude with the glasses and hat — he wants you to play)
Once you’re inside the Musuem, you find yourself in a big open warehouse-like space that houses about three dozen Soviet arcade machines from the 70s and 80s. This is what it looks like from a little cosy treehouse chill nook near the entrance:
There are two levels at the back of the space for double the Soviet arcade machine action:
Then when you’re at the back and you turn around and look back towards the front, this is what you see:
So, it’s not the MOST ginormous space, but it’s pretty big! And most importantly, (almost) everything works, and works well. Even the old-school soda machines! Check them out:
You’ve got your Kvass (a very-slightly-alcoholic refreshing fermented bread beverage) machine on the left, and the seltzer machines next to it. 1 kopeck gets you a plain seltzer, but for 3 kopecks you can get ether the pear or the apple syrup mixed in. Mmmm! It taste like Glasnost
Visiting this place was an intensely nostalgic experience for me — I’d played many of the games they have as a kid growing up in St. Petersburg in the 1980s, but hadn’t seen the machines since then and had largely forgotten they even existed! But seeing them again, I immediately and viscerally understood what it must be like for an American kid to go to a place like Barcade.
I took pictures of pretty much every cabinet in the place, and I’ll be sharing them in a series of future posts that will engage with the museum’s collection through a couple different lenses / focuses (focusi??) — strange controls, multiplayer & spectatorship, clones…..mebbe some others too!
Here are a couple closeups to whet your appetite:
