After a five-year, ten-city lap around the nation, "Hot Circuits" - the world's first-ever retrospective of the video arcade game - has become part of the permanent collection at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, New York. Arcade games in a museum?
Museum Director Rochelle Slovin describes the show as "a conservation effort." From a connoisseur's perspective, the cabinets, not the circuits, are collectors' items. The widespread industry practice of gutting video games in order to "recycle" the kiosks has rendered the original graphic art from the cabinet sides of older games exceedingly rare. AMMI went to great lengths to track down games with original cabinet art; those they found are shown so as to ensure their graphics get seen. They are widely spaced and spotlit, signifying their newfound status as objets d'art.
The exhibit houses the customary array of golden oldies - Pong, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Pac-Man, and the indomitable Donkey Kong - as well as some notable duds: Remember Qix? Dragon's Lair? Or the abominable, unplayable Baby Pac-Man video game-cum-pinball machine?
The oldest and rarest games of them all - Computer Space and Maneater - have cabinets sculpted from fiberglass, and they really do have an air of monumentality. Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space, the game that started it all, is enshrined in a separate case. With its pearl-flake paint job and squishy biomorphism, it resembles nothing so much as a gross of luminous green bowling balls, melted down and then extruded through a hole in the floor. Computer Space is weird like only 1971 could have been. Equally memorable is 1975's Maneater. Possibly the worst game ever made, it compensates with cabinetwork worthy of the greatest. Maneater's fiberglass case is a Jaws riff on the Great White, complete with flickering screen nestled inside a gaping mouth. Seen in the context of a museum, these games are monuments of pop culture.
Unlike most exhibits, at "Hot Circuits" you're expected to play with the pieces of art. For a dollar, you get five tokens - and I didn't see anybody buying them as souvenirs. American Museum of the Moving Image: +1 (718) 784 4520.
- Adam Fisher
ELECTRIC WORD
A Long Way from Pong
