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# Four decades of consoles move into the museum
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/achiampong-the-gaming-room/
- Published: 2026-08-17T18:36:09.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-17T18:36:09.000Z
- Description: Larry Achiampong's The Gaming Room furnishes Pixel Pioneers at the Boijmans with a playable living room—games as memory, kinship and diaspora.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: Larry Achiampong, exhibition, Installation, Feng Mengbo, Suzanne Treister, Rotterdam, street fighter, museum, London, united kingdom

The most radical gesture in [Pixel Pioneers](https://www.boijmans.nl/en/exhibitions/pixel-pioneers?ref=killscreen.com), the first exhibition Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has devoted entirely to digital art, might be a couch. *The Gaming Room* (2021–ongoing), Larry Achiampong's contribution, rebuilds a domestic lounge inside the Depot, Rotterdam's publicly accessible art-storage building, out of the artist's own archive: consoles running from the 8-bit era to immersive 3D, plus games, books, music, film and memorabilia gathered across four decades. Three monitors are playable—*Street Fighter* among them—while a fourth runs a film in which, [as Studio International's review describes](https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/pixel-pioneers-review-depot-museum-boijmns-van-beuningen-rotterdam?ref=killscreen.com), Achiampong recalls growing up Ghanaian in London, using games to shape mythic identities and to bond with a brother, and with the brother's avatars. The museum's [announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbJJayTCNRZ/?ref=killscreen.com) makes the framing explicit: video games as sites of memory, storytelling and togetherness, not objects behind glass. You are meant to sit down and stay a while.

The company is strong. Feng Mengbo's *Long March: Restart* (2008) runs as a 17-meter playable projection that drops a Red Army soldier into a side-scroller armed with Coke cans. Suzanne Treister's HEXEN tarot decks recount histories of countercultures, blockchain and AI, and Geert Mul's *Horizons* (2008)—restored for this show—rearranges the museum's landscape paintings into a database panorama that shifts as you move. Amira Gad curates; the show runs through September 13.

![A long interactive projection of a retro side-scrolling game in a museum gallery](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/feng-mengbo-long-march-restart.jpg)

Feng Mengbo, **Long March: Restart*, 2008\. Installation view, Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Lotte Stekelenburg

A decade ago we were writing about VR showrooms promising to [turn your living room into a universal storefront](https://www.killscreen.com/virtual-reality-showrooms-turn-your-living-room-into-a-universal-storefront/). Achiampong runs that current in reverse: the museum becomes a living room, and the point of the screens is the people between them. That it happens inside a storage facility—the least domestic architecture imaginable, 155,000 objects racked overhead—only sharpens the argument. The collection holds paintings; the couch holds memory.