AN Australian museum is developing an exhibition to investigate the influence of motor culture on video gaming.
The National Motor Museum in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia was this month awarded a $125,000 grant from the Australian government to create “REVolution: where pixels meet motors – an interactive history of video gaming and motor culture”.
The museum’s director Paul Rees said he first had the idea for the exhibition while watching his 15-year-old son playing motor racing video games.
“I thought ‘this is part of motoring history – how people interact with motoring culture through video games, there’s an exhibition in this,” he said.
“We are looking at the early days of racing in modern culture and the influence on video games from motorbikes to motorcars.
At the same time we’ve looked at the dashboards of modern day cars and we want to also explore how video gaming has informed the modern car and the modern driving experience.”
Early racing video games in the 1970s included Atari’s Gran Trak 10 and Sega’s Monaco GP.
The 1980s and 1990s saw the introduction of top sellers such as Pole Position, Out Run, Mario Kart, Daytona and Gran Turismo.
“We can’t ignore GTA (Grand Theft Auto) – it’s much maligned but much loved as well and as a museum we have a duty to look at everything,” Rees said.
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