How the Barbican turned video games into a global arts tour

The London arts institution has been touring its groundbreaking video game exhibition for 12 years. Now it's heading back to the UK with some bold new ideas

In 1998, one of the co-founders of Rockstar, the studio behind the blockbusting Grand Theft Auto series, was chatting with the director of the National Museums of Scotland when he suggested something relatively new: an exhibition of video games. The scale and the complexity of the task looked daunting though, so the duo - Rockstar's Lucien King, and Sir Mark Jones, now master at St Cross College, Oxford - sought help. The Barbican answered.

The result was the 2002 exhibition Game On, which packed the Barbican's gallery with hundreds of vintage arcade machines and computers. I wrote about it at the time, inspired by King's enthusiasm; and when I visited just after opening it was astonishing to see artefacts like an old PDP-10 mainframe and the original Pong cabinet. This wasn't the first example of a major cultural space embracing games. The American Museum of the Moving Image began its Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade exhibition in 1989 and toured it around the US for the next five years. Japan also saw a number of exhibitions through the 1990s. But 13 years ago, it was certainly rare - especially for a general arts venue like the Barbican. The organisers were far from sure about how it would go.