RETROGAMING

Date of event

Venue

Jihočeské muzeum v Českých Budějovicích
Dukelská 1, České Budějovice 6, 370 01

This interactive exhibition of historic computers traces the evolution of computing technology from its beginnings to the mid-1990s. It even includes a gamer’s den! Play games like Prince of Persia, Pac-Man, Doom, Wolfenstein, Street Fighter II, or Space Invaders. You can try out more than 1,000 games.

The main focus is on computer games and home computers and consoles from the 1980s—both Czechoslovakian (IQ 151, PMD, or Didaktik) and foreign (Apple, Amstrad, Atari, Commodore, IBM, Nintendo, Sega, or Sinclair).

Visitors will not only get to know the big gaming hits (from Pac-Man and Space Invaders through Prince of Persia to Doom and Street Fighter II), but also period gaming magazines. The exhibition includes a gamer’s den—a game room with vintage computers, an arcade machine, and modern PCs running emulators.

Computers for gaming? No way!

“Actually, it’s easy—we play awesome games on them at school.”

“Playing games on such an expensive machine? Don’t even think about it—I’d have to chop your hand off if you did!”

Company executives who used the earliest (mainframe) computers shared a similar attitude toward playing (and creating) computer games as Mrs. Škopková in this Czech film classic. Nevertheless, the first games began to appear as early as the 1950s, for example, to entertain bored visitors to computing labs.

But the biggest boom didn’t take off until the 1970s. Arcade machines appeared—people lined up at American bars for the first gaming hit in history, *Space Invaders* (1978). The Atari Home Pong console (1975) brought little squares to life on black-and-white TV screens. Home computers from companies like Apple, Commodore, Atari, and Sinclair soon followed. At first, IBM didn’t understand what use computers would be to people at home, but the success of their competitors forced them to change their minds.

Children played games, “killing” a lot of time in the process, but they also learned how to work with computers. In Czechoslovakia, students encountered the IQ 151 computer in schools—which ran so hot that there was no need to heat the classrooms—as well as the PMD 85 and the “Zbrojováček” Consul 2717.

The luckier ones got a Slovak Didaktik Gama for home use, which was compatible with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, so there were plenty of games available for it. Of course, it could also be used for work—after purchasing a Tesla BT-100 single-needle printer, nicknamed “The Runaway Nail,” it took just twenty minutes to print a single A4 page.

Better machines were available only at Tuzex (Atari 800 XL/XE) or from friends in the West (Commodore 64). The 16-bit Amiga and Atari ST computers didn’t become more widespread until after the revolution. But by the mid-1990s, they had all been supplanted by the expansion of IBM PC-compatible machines.

The turbulent history of the early days of computing and gaming is chronicled in detail by an exhibition at the Regional Museum in Litomyšl titled “Retrogaming,” which has been touring the Czech Republic since 2014. It has visited over thirty towns and cities, both large and small, from Klatovy to Opava.

An integral part of the exhibition is a game room where visitors can try out thousands of old games. The oldest “glitchy” games (Centipede, Pac-Man, Pitfall!, Missile Command…) will appeal mainly to those who remember them, but even today’s children often enjoy playing these classic games. And so they battle it out in Street Fighter II or Double Dragon, fight in Golden Axe, shoot in Doom and Wolfenstein, jump with Prince or Prehistorik, race in Vroom and Lotus, compete in Speedball and Tetris, save the Lemmings (Lemmings)… Or they might even try out what’s now considered a “dead genre”—flight simulators.

Unfortunately, there isn’t usually enough space at the exhibition for more time-consuming strategy games (SimCity, Pirates, Civilization, Dune II…), dungeon crawlers (Dungeon Master, Ishar…), or adventure games (The Secret of Monkey Island, Another World…)—but some people enjoy firing them up, even if just for a moment, to reminisce about their childhood…

The exhibition is open at the South Bohemian Museum in České Budějovice (Dukelská 1) from October 9, 2026 through January 31, 2027 (Tuesday–Sunday, holidays | 9:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m.).


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.