Museum of North Texas History opens playable game exhibit, running through Sept. 26

The Museum of North Texas History is running a playable video game exhibit through Sept. 26, leaving Cooke County families about six weeks to make the drive to Wichita Falls. Entry to the exhibit costs $5, according to the museum's official flyer, which lists free exhibit entry for museum members and for military visitors with ID.

The museum announced the show as "Game On: The Evolution of Gaming and Entertainment" and billed it as an America 250 exhibition on the history of play, video games and arcade entertainment. It opened June 4. The museum describes the space as interactive, with authentic hands-on games spanning every era and a full free-play arcade, and its opening-night post invited visitors to try vintage arcade machines and video games firsthand. The flyer credits a collaboration with Maniac's Mansion. America250 says the July 4 anniversary this year marked 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The museum materials reviewed for this report do not list specific playable titles. They confirm hands-on games across eras without naming individual games, and none of the first-party museum or government records reviewed here identify Atari hardware, Duck Hunt, Crash Bandicoot or GoldenEye as playable in the gallery. Those names do date the rungs of the timeline the museum says it covers. Atari's corporate history puts the VCS, later renamed the 2600, at 1977. Nintendo dates Duck Hunt to the 1985 NES launch, played with the Zapper accessory, and GoldenEye 007 to the Nintendo 64 in 1997. PlayStation says Sony published Crash Bandicoot in 1996.

Play is familiar ground at this museum. It keeps a permanent exhibit, "Generations of Play," on toys and classic games from the early 20th century to today, with hands-on pieces and vintage displays. Wichita Falls Resolution No. 57-2023 authorized donating artifacts from the abandoned Railroad Museum to the museum so the public could view them and learn their historical significance.

For families weighing the cost of a day out, the $5 exhibit charge runs less than half the adult admission at the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, a museum devoted to the subject, which says it preserves video game history and culture through interactive exhibits and educational programs. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has described "The Art of Video Games" as one of the first exhibitions to explore the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium.

The audience is broad. The Entertainment Software Association reports more than 200 million Americans play at least once a week, and it puts the industry's Texas footprint at roughly $6.5 billion supporting about 22,000 jobs.

The museum is at 720 Indiana Avenue in Wichita Falls, outside Cooke County. Gainesville's own county museum, the Morton, has operated since 1968 out of an 1884 downtown building.