Oakland’s video game museum helps gamers get their game on

Until now, Oakland’s Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment — also known as the MADE, also known as the video game museum, and also known as a superawesome nerd magnet — has been a virtual hidden gem.

To get there, you had to be as persistent as some kind of magical-mutant-gnome-warrior princess on a quest for dragon treasure that required taking down a skeleton minotaur through hyperspace-D-pad-down-button-tapping frenzies and employment of a level-1,743 blade of flaming chaos to get past the mine-embedded fortress wall.

OK, it wasn’t quite that difficult. But for the past four years, the MADE — with its archive of thousands of computer video games from Pong to Donkey Kong and beyond, its playable exhibits, tournaments and offerings of free game-programming classes — has lived behind Oakland’s City Hall on the second floor of a multiuse office building. To get in, you had to ring an exceptionally nonmagical buzzer that didn’t work half the time.

It was a serious challenge, you can bet your Asteroids.

Now, thanks to a successful summer Kickstarter campaign, the nonprofit museum has moved to spacious ground-floor digs at 3400 Broadway, a blond-brick building at the upper end of Oakland’s Auto Row in the old Saw Mill furniture store.

The MADE will celebrate with a “Grand Reopening Spectacular Awesome First Friday Ninja Party” at 6 p.m. Feb. 5. Then it will officially open Feb. 6, continuing its ongoing mission to preserve video game history, herald it as an art form and educate the public about game development.

For a $5 entry fee, what you’ll find is a big room with, well, a ton of computer-game stuff. You’ll travel through time, from the Paleozoic period (black-and-white screens and primitive graphics) to 21st-century technology — a reflection of tech advances but also stages of pop-culture as seen in the artwork, music, game genres and increasingly elaborate storytelling.

And while this is not like an arcade with big, vintage, cabinet-style coin-op games, the rear wall will be lined with an evolution of home-game consoles — from Atari to Nintendo, Sony and Xboxes — on which you can actually play some of the classics.

“The idea is an interactive museum setting,” says museum founder Alex Handy, a tech journalist in real life. “Not to just come in and look at the stuff, but play some of it, learn about it. We really try to emphasize the game development, what makes games unique, what makes them fun. Fun is a very nebulous concept.”

Digital history

I met Handy here a couple of weeks ago, while he and fellow volunteers were still in setup mode. There were boxes all over the place filled with game cartridges — “AirForce Delta,” “Ariel the Little Mermaid,” “Zork Nemesis,” “Zaxxon’s Motherbase 2000” and more — plus cables, consoles, a bounty of joysticks, and a sea of old TVs and computer monitors. There were a couple of large games, like the “B.S.B.B. II” (“Big Steel Battalion Box”), which looks like a big black safe with a sliding door. Inside is a seat, a video screen, pedals, controllers and lots of buttons.

“It came out around 2002, 2003, and it’s supposed to simulate being in a giant walking robot,” Handy says. “There’s even an eject button.”

Some of the collection comes from book sales at public libraries, but most comes from donations, “out of closets and garages,” Handy says, rummaging through two bags of old Atari components someone just dropped off. “The Atari 5200 was a horrible failure,” he says, pulling one out of the bag. “Who would have thought it would someday be in a museum?”

Handy, a longtime video game collector, got the idea for the museum in 2008 when hunting for game-related stuff at the Laney College Flea Market. He came across a bunch of rare games, such as the unreleased Atari 2600 version of ColecoVision’s “Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park.”

“It was extremely rare in the video game collecting world, and I thought, who is gonna preserve this stuff?” he says. “The companies that made these games are long gone. Concept drawings get thrown out. The world of digital game preservation is surprisingly small.”

Dedicated museum

Indeed, there are exhibits dedicated to video games at the MoMA in New York and at the Smithsonian. Archive.org has a Web-based library of arcade video games from the 1970s to the 1990s. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View encompasses a vast view of the digital world, but Handy says video games “are just a subset of that.” So he opened his fledgling museum in that hidden office space in 2011. “We sort of saw the old space as a lab, to see what it was like to have a video game museum, because it really hasn’t been a thing before.”

His ultimate goal is a world-class institution, perhaps near Yerba Buena Gardens. For now, he has big plans for the new Oakland space. Hours will still be noon to 6 p.m. on weekends because the museum has an all-volunteer staff. But with some big-hitting sponsors such as Google, Dolby and Sony, the MADE will expand its free programming classes for kids and adults and offer meetups, game development parties and community events. There will even be a gift shop with cool shirts, stickers and random stuff it’s selling off (Xbox 360 RCA cables, anyone?).

Even if you don’t know the intricacies of maxing your valor and running mythic dungeons, you will still get a kick out of this place.

“By now, probably everyone — any age — has played a video game in their lifetime,” Handy says. “It’s not a new thing anymore. It’s part of our cultural heritage. So we’re trying to foster an environment where everybody can enjoy it.”

Contact Angela Hill at ahill@bayareanewsgroup.com, or follow her on Twitter @GiveEmHill.