The Computer Games Museum on Karl-Marx-Allee opened in 2011 and claims — correctly — to be the world's first museum dedicated permanently to the history of video games. The collection spans the full arc from 1970s arcade cabinets and home consoles through to contemporary gaming, with around 300 exhibits and a significant proportion of them playable. The curation is unusually serious for its subject: the museum treats games as cultural objects and design artefacts, not just nostalgia triggers, and there is genuine historical depth in the way it traces the medium's development across different national industries.
The building's location on Karl-Marx-Allee is a pleasing irony — a museum of Western consumer culture installed on the GDR's great socialist showcase boulevard. Allow two to three hours if you intend to play any of the machines; the rarer hardware is kept behind glass but there is more than enough to spend time on. Admission is not free but is reasonable by Berlin museum standards, and the ticket includes access to a small but well-stocked archive of gaming materials.