The last Saturday, two of our members had the pleasure of attending the opening of the Arcade Vintage Museum, located in Ibi, Alicante, Nicolás Ibáñez, Therefore's programmer and María Benítez, who occasionally helps the Nexus as Community Manager. Below they tell us their experience.

Just as we enter the museum, the first thing we could enjoy was the good manners and the attention of its staff, members of the Arcade Vintage association. A fact that we could confirm during the day through different conversations with them.

We have already read on their web that the museum had a great collection of arcade cabinets, gaming consoles and retro computers. Just after enter the main room, we noticed indeed that there are a lot of arcade cabinets which any visitor can freely play with. But beyond this, what in part, was the expected, we were surprised by many other great things that we are going to tell you now.

We highlight that the arcade collection includes cabinets from the classic games of the beginning to the most modern machines, so it covers really well the different epochs of the history of arcade rooms. For example as classics we find cabinets like Break Out (Atari, 1976),  Space Invaders (Taito, 1978), Asteroids (Atari, 1979) o Galaxian (Namco, 1979). In the 80s, we can play Pac-Man (Namco, 1980), Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981), Galaga (Namco, 1981), Qbert (Gottlieb, 1982), Arkanoid (Taito, 1986), Out Run (Sega, 1986) y After Burner (Sega, 1987) among many others.

Until we find more modern cabinets like Super Street Fighter IV (Capcom, 2010) and where also exists machines that offer different control interfaces beside the classic arcade stick with buttons, like driving arcades: OutRun 2 SP (Sega, 2004) y Sega Racing Classics Twin (Sega, 2009); shooters like House of the Dead (Sega, 1996) or Virtua Cop 3 (Sega, 2003). Even they got for the opening the machine F-Zero AX (Sega, 2003), a huge one.

Finishing with the arcade cabinets, we emphasize with one of that great surprises we mentioned, and that's beside all the above, in this museum there is place for new arcade cabinets with video games made by indie developers. Something that we love at Trim Tangle, as we are an indie game studio. So we can play, among others, some of the arcades made by Locomalito: Maldita Castilla EX (2016), Verminest Arcade (2016) or the just released  Darkula (2019).

By the other hand, as any good arcade room, the museum can't miss the pinball machines! We both got a great time playing pinballs, we didn't remember how addictive they were.

It's the moment of telling what we could find about gaming consoles. We won't expend time listing all the well-known gaming consoles from Nintendo, Sega, Sony or Microsoft along the history and that are, of course, present in the museum's collection. Neither their corresponding handheld game consoles. Instead we consider more interesting to highlight those that were more special and remarkable (in our humble opinion and without undervalue the rest). We could see displayed among others: Amiga CD32, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar, NEC CoreGrafx, Panasonic 3DO FZ1, Philips CD-i, SNK Neo Geo and SNK Neo Geo AES.

Now, we continue talking about the great collection of computers. The part that Nico, Therefore's programmer, liked the most, and who writes these words:

"To understand why I liked this so much, I must explain that my first steps in computing were using a MSX Philips VG-8020, and later, a MSX2 Philips VG-8235. And not only playing to those wonderful video games that were released for these machines, but also learning programming in Basic when I was just 8 years old. I was also lucky having the chance of using other computers of friends and family, like the ZX Spectrum 128 +2 and the Amstrad CPC 464."

Because of that, you will understand that we extend a little more with this part of the collection. Nico is not capable of avoid showing you almost all the computers that he could admire at the museum ;). And obviously, in first place we show you the MSX computers:

Among the most famous ones, we could also see Spectrum computers and Commodore 64:

And many others computers too:

But besides of just look at computers displayed in glass cabinets, we were gratefully to discover that also was possible to play to a big part of the computers collection, like those which were a boom in the 80s and allowed us the opportunity of enjoy great video games made in our country. Not for nothing this period is known as the Golden Age of the Spanish Software. We could play with computers like MSX, Spectrum, Amstrad, Commodore, Apple, Amiga...

And if we mention the Golden Age of Spanish Software, we can't stop admiring the great collection of Alfonso Azpiri's game covers that includes practically all the original video games for what he made the cover.

At last, we want to remark that the museum is not only careful with its amazing collection, but also they had put an extra effort creating a great atmosphere for the museum, with details that don't go unnotticed. For example, across the museum we can find screens showing commercials about video games, gaming consoles and computers from different moments of history. And these videos are framed in monitors and TVs related to the corresponding epoch. Another example are the windows, that recreate colored stained glasses  with video game elements.

Here we finish telling our impressions. We strongly recommend to visit the museum if you have the chance. If you belong to those generations that expended their adolescence inside arcade rooms, or playing to the legendary 8 & 16 bits gaming consoles like the NES, SNES or Genesis... or fiddling with the 80s' micro computers, there is no better place where you can revive your best memories that the Arcade Vintage Museum. In the other hand, if you didn't enjoy that pleasures those days, it's never late to discover and enjoy the arcade cabinets and video games that has marked the history of digital entartainment. In any case, we are sure that any visitor will enjoy the museum.