Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines

In 2005, three friends – Alexander Stakhanov, Maxim Pinigin and Alexander Vugman – decided to relive their childhood and play “Sea Fight”. It all started with Alexander Vugman’s humorous suggestion to look for such an arcade machine. At first, none of them believed they could find it, but a broken machine was found in the Tagansky Park of Culture in Moscow. In the process, it turned out that no one had ever collected Soviet arcade games before, and this was a great idea for their own project.

They searched for their future exhibits around Moscow: they called park administrations, cultural centers, and former pioneer camps. It was necessary to negotiate with each individual but in general, no one then thought about the value of these machines – usually they were simply thrown out or disassembled for scrap. The cases and parts they found occupied one of their garages, where their restoration was also carried out. In two years, the friends managed to find and restore about 50 arcades, and in 2007 they opened the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in Moscow.

The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines conducts research activities in different areas. The first area is stock work (accounting and description of exhibits), creating an information base about each exhibit in the museum’s collection. Secondly, the museum preserves an important layer of the technical history of the USSR. Arcade machines from that time are unique objects as both monuments of material culture and as examples of Soviet design, everyday life, and the entertainment industry. Being the only museum of its kind with a narrow specificity, the museum is a member of ICOM (International Council of Museums)