Vancouver pop-up exhibit celebrates Canada’s video game history

A new pop-up exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver highlights Canada's contributions to video game history.

A new pop-up exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver is giving visitors a chance to explore Canada’s video game history while highlighting the important role British Columbia developers have played in shaping the industry.

The Canadian Video Game Museum’s pop-up features everything from modern blockbuster titles to early games developed in B.C., along with historic gaming hardware and consoles that helped define generations of players.

Ryan Dunnison, the museum’s executive director and founder, noted the industry is now more than 50 years old.

“We’re at this new stage where we’re starting to lose a lot of that really early history, and so we thought it was really important to keep a hold of some of that,” he said.

Among the artifacts on display are games such as Desert Fox, produced by Sydney Development Corporation in the mid-1980s, as well as locally developed educational games featuring maps of British Columbia and other made-in-Canada titles.

Hardware on display includes systems such as the ColecoVision, developed in Montreal, and the Gravis GamePad, a controller created in Vancouver that became popular with gamers in the 1990s.

“One of the most popular game controllers in the ‘90s was actually made here in the city,” said Dunnison.

The interactive exhibit allows visitors to play locally developed games while learning how the industry has evolved over the decades.

Brendan Brooks, director of operations at the Museum of Vancouver, said the partnership reflects a broader effort to preserve digital history.

“We’re talking so much about preservation in video games and how do you continue to do that, how do you continue to store and preserve things, particularly in a digital era?” he said. “It really made sense for us to start finding some space for them to do that.”

The volunteer-run pop-up is scheduled to remain open until October. Organizers say strong public interest could eventually help it become a permanent exhibit.

“What we’d like for people to get out of it is mostly just to see some of the amazing things that have been done here over time,” said Dunnison.

Dunnison said more donations and displays are expected to arrive in the coming weeks.