I recently had the pleasure of going to the “Power Up” exhibition in London’s Science Museum with a friend with whom I share a serious history of Mario Karting and Partying.
Power Up is a celebration of all things video-gaming. Or a very fully featured arcade dedicated to (mostly) home gaming systems.
They’ve got their hands on 160 consoles and PCs from over the past fifty years, video gaming of course being still a fairly young artform.
Each of them is set up with a pre-ordained game and sufficient controllers to relieve one’s youthful gaming experiences, no matter when in calendar time your youth actually was.
This was the first time I ever got to play something akin to the original version of Pong - Atari’s first video game and one of the earliest in general, having been first released in 1972.
The version on offer here was on the no-longer famous Binatone TV Master 4 Plus 2 console from 1977. It has very sensitive weird dial-like controllers which move the bats up and down as you play a real basic but extremely difficult (for me) game of virtual tennis or one of the other 6 - yes six! - modes.
Fortunately the games were pre-loaded so one doesn’t have to sit through 15 minutes of screeching tape noise in order to get to playing Fantasy World Dizzy, here on 1984’s Amstrad CPC 464, complete with cassette tape drive. This, fellow kids, was from the era before 99p instant gratification app stores were a thing.
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Some of the more iconic franchises - Sonic, Mario - had their own sections allowing you to experience the character in question over time. Including surely one of the world’s most perfect platformers ever, Super Mario World.
Note though that for the various versions of Mario Kart - playing the Gamecube’s Double Dash was our personal highlight - you head to the multiplayer section.
For the slightly more modern, more hardcore, gamer with better reflexes than I can ever hope to have there’s an ongoing 16 player Halo tournament. Wii bowling and one of the dance like no-one’s watching style games are also available for those who prefer their action more physical. A big bank of PC games are also on show for those who prefer the non-console life, although I didn’t really understand how to play most of them.