Vol.36 The Game in the Museum

In July 2024, the CADPA Game Museum opened in Shanghai — two thousand square meters, over five thousand artifacts, and a dedicated zone for the development of Chinese games. It is the country's first permanent institution to call games cultural heritage. But the oldest item in the case is a pirated CD-ROM in a plastic sleeve, and the curator who presented it didn't laugh when a visitor did.


In this episode, Shawn and Serevnt ask what it means for a still-young industry to build its own monument. They map the West's ten-year head start — MoMA's 2012 "interaction design" acquisition of Pac-Man and Tetris, the V&A's 2018 Design/Play/Disrupt show (which collected WeChat as a design object), and The Strong's World Video Game Hall of Fame, running since 2015. They confront the preservation paradox: a museum can exhibit the box but often cannot legally run the game, while the Video Game History Foundation estimates 87% of pre-2010 games are already gone, and a 2024 US Copyright Office ruling kept remote access blocked.


The conversation turns personal — Shawn once sold those very bootleg discs — and lands on Black Myth Wukong, the 2024 Chinese 3A built on a 16th-century novel, as proof that heritage and a living industry can share the same room.