The video game long ago surpassed the status of mere children’s entertainment to become something more. Today, its industry moves more than twice as much money in Spain as recorded music and cinema combined, and the titles that fill store shelves are beginning to be considered cultural products, worthy of even being exhibited and observed with admiration. . Just like with a sculpture or a painting. And precisely that is what is going to begin to happen a few steps from the Plaza de Callao on December 4, the opening date of the OXO Madrid Video Game Museumthe first to arrive permanently in the capital of Spain.
«The intention we have is to value the video game at all levels. For us it is the tenth art,” Javier Ramos, director of the OXO Museum, explains to ABC, a center that already had a first headquarters in Malaga open in 2023. It is currently the third most visited museum in the Andalusian town, only behind the Pablo Picasso and Thyssen, with 130,000 attendees in its first year of life.
The Madrid headquarters of OXO offers visitors a walk through the more than seventy years of video game history until reaching the present day. And practically everything on the two floors that comprise it, “95%”, as Ramos explains, can be touched and is available to the user to play a game.
Among the oldest pieces, attention is drawn, for example, to a small analog computer on which ‘Tennis for Two’ runs, a pioneering work dating back to 1952. There is also a perfectly functional prototype of ‘Pong’ (1972), proposed in the that two users compete in a virtual ping pong game.
The Pong machine
Obviously, on the route there is room for microcomputers, such as Commodore and Amstrad, with which video games began to emerge as a valid leisure option for young people in the 1980s. Although it was not until the nineties, with Nintendo and Sega brand consoles already on the market, when the phenomenon finished exploding. The titles became deeper on a narrative level and the graphics began to improve by leaps and bounds. All these machines, such as the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2 or Xbox, which came later, are ready in the museum to be enjoyed by the user. Each one on the corresponding television; because a Nintendo NES console does not feel the same on a screen from its time, the late eighties, as on a state-of-the-art 8K panel of those sold now.
The Virtual Boy, launched by Nintendo in 1995
«We try to take a tour of the most important video games in history. Obviously we can’t fit all of them, because there are many, but they can rotate over time. What the OXO Museum aspires to is to be a living environment that changes over time. We have a very large collection,” says Ramos, who anticipates that “there are many unique pieces” that are already on their way from abroad and that will soon be exhibited.
30 years of PlayStation
The Madrid OXO has a room for temporary exhibitions that, at the time of its opening, is dedicated to taking a tour of the 30 years of PlayStation history. There the user, in addition to finding all the machines and accessories of the Japanese firm, will be able to play such important video games as ‘Spyro the dragon’, ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ or ‘Astro Bot’, a work that has just landed on PS5.
At the PlayStation exhibition the player can play titles like ‘Crash Bandiccot’ or ‘Silent Hill’
«We very proudly celebrate this anniversary with this exhibition. Our community does not stop growing and today we have more than 116 million active players per month,” Cristina Infante, head of marketing for PlayStation in Spain, told this newspaper.
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