If you ever feel nostalgic for old Defender arcade machines, the 3D tank action in Battle Zone, or even the simple pleasures of bouncing heads on a Commodore 64, you can relive your lost youth at the Barbican Art Gallery in London.
The world's biggest and best computer games exhibition opens there today, and runs until September. After that it moves to the Royal Museum in Edinburgh (from October to February next year), the first leg of a world tour that is expected to reach as far as Japan. And while Game On may have a gallery setting, there is nothing dry or academic about it. Most of the exhibits are playable.
Dropping in for a sneak preview on Monday, I was struck by how much the show resembled my loft. Partly this was because it still looked a bit of a tip, with paint rollers on the floor, and stuff spilling out of boxes - inevitably part of putting on a show. Mainly it was because most of the video games business is recent history. The Sinclair Spectrum, for example, was launched only 20 years ago last month, and the Sony PlayStation only seven years ago. Where the Barbican scores over my loft and yours is in its size and scope. The exhibition covers two floors - some 2,000 square metres - and includes some classic machines that few gamers have seen, except in photographs.
The most exciting are the $350,000 DEC PDP-1 minicomputer on which the first video game, SpaceWar, was produced in 1962; Computer Space, a futuristic-looking arcade system launched in 1971; and Pong, the Atari arcade game that kicked off a huge money-making industry in 1972. The hardware display starts in the first gallery and has an immediate impact.
But the emphasis soon shifts to software, where the improvements in graphics, sound and content are even more spectacular. Space Invaders was amazingly addictive for its time, but the graphics and sound were simple, and the plot wasn't exactly on a par with War and Peace. But creating major games rapidly became much like creating feature films, with storyboards, artwork, plots, and at least the occasional gesture in the direction of character development. And today, home games consoles such as Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube can put graphics on your TV set that would have been the envy of Hollywood moguls a couple of years ago.
Game On shows some of the original artwork and level maps used to create Grand Theft Auto 3, and some other groundbreaking games. Conrad Bodmin, the Barbican gallery's resident curator, says: "One of the things I wanted to express was that a lot of traditional artistic work went on before you got to the computing side."
Again, it is the sort of thing most people never have the chance to see. Professor Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies programme at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, and one of the advisors for the exhibition, says he thinks computer gaming "is going to be the most significant art form for the 21st century," but continual hardware changes and lack of this kind of background material present problems.
"It's already much harder to do computer games than study the early history of the cinema," says Jenkins, because movies were being copyrighted. "If it wasn't for the pirates, there'd be no way of tracking our way through the early steps at all." That so much has survived is down to the participants - the programmers and the fans - rather than libraries or museums. For example, Computer Space and Pong machines are on loan from Archer Maclean, who wrote International Karate Plus - yes, that's the one with bouncing heads.
But unless more organisations follow the lead of the Museum of Scotland - which funded the initial research behind Game On, by guest curator Lucien King - there is a risk that the appreciation of games could be confined to a ghetto, like comic books. Video gaming is a big business, of course, and Britons spend more on games than on videos or visits to the cinema.
Last year, according to the European Leisure Software Publishers Association, the UK market was worth £1.6bn; this year it should be much bigger, following the high-profile launches of the Xbox and GameCube. But financial success alone will never get the cultural establishment to take games seriously.
In the end, that is what makes the Barbican exhibition important: it brings together the raw materials needed by anyone who wants to develop an aesthetic for a new genre. But if you are a gamer who doesn't care two hoots about the cultural implications, it still looks like a terrific day out.
