Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines

An interior view of the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines, resembling a 1980s USSR video game arcade.

A picture of some Soviet-era kopeck coins, used to operate the game machines.

This is a picture of three drink dispensers at the entrance to the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines. In addition to the arcade games, the museum also features old soda machines and photo booths from the same time period.

The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines takes visitors back in time not only to the nation’s Soviet past, but to the childhoods of many locals who grew up in the USSR. There are a number of classic childhood pastimes that locals may be familiar with, including “Soyuzmultfilm’s cartoons, Olympic Bear, planetarium, Sportloto lottery, football at the yard… pioneer camps at the Black Sea, horn sounds, walking-tours and songs near the campfire… walks with parents and friends at the Parks of Culture with ice-cream, fizzy drink and candy floss, and more[1].” Amongst these are Arcade Games – another widely loved pastime of Soviet youth that were created at secret military factories from the seventies until the Perestroika. The machines were initially built by the USSR’s Ministry of Culture, modeled after American and Japanese arcade machines under the approval of then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, but were later also locally made based on Russian fairy tales – leading to over 100 different types of machines[2].  Although many have been forgotten and disassembled since the collapse of the USSR and the onset of the computer era, the three creators of the Museum began collecting these machines and restoring them to create a collection – or perhaps more accurately, a modern-day replica of a 1980s USSR video game arcade - for modern-day visitors to view and enjoy since the museum’s opening in 2007[3]. 

The collection continues to expand today, and two more Soviet arcade museums have been founded in St. Petersburg and Kazan to date based on the original Moscow museum’s success. The museum is primarily interactive, with most machines functioning and available for people to play, making the site an interesting cross between a museum and recreational space. Visitors not only experience a superimposition of temporality in the historical sense, rediscovering cultural artifacts from the Soviet era in a present where these machines are mostly considered ‘outdated’, but also in the sense of a human lifespan – traveling back to the youth of Russians back then and now to experience childhood in the Soviet era through a unique lens. For many people, often the smaller memories and encounters of our daily lives end up composing the most lasting and treasured memories of our lives, and these arcade machines prove to be great testimony to that by revealing how much a seemingly unimportant and forgotten object can be such a quintessential element of the lives of entire generations of Soviet era children. Dr. Stephen Norris, a Professor of History at Miami University of Ohio, states that “Nostalgia for the video games of the 1970s and 1980s is part of a larger nostalgia for Soviet consumer products of late socialism,” a period when Russians were introduced to many popular items ranging from wall-mounted radios to vacuum cleaners[4] – indicating arcade machines’ association with both an entire historical era as well as individuals’ years of childhood for Russian locals themselves who visit these museums as well.  By conjuring up the past in terms of both the Soviet epoch at large, perhaps through the Soviet 15 kopek coins that the games operate on, and the childhood of individuals within that epoch, through the timeless, childish enjoyment of playing arcade games as well as forgotten memories triggered by past cultural references and propaganda within the games, the museum offers a dual sense of temporality and takes both locals and visitors alike on a unique time travel to the nostalgic or unfamiliar past.