Remember, as a kid, enthusiastically mashing buttons on a video game controller? Now imagine the video game that inspired your enthusiasm. There’s a decent chance both were made in Vancouver. The city and the Lower Mainland at large have played a major role in the gaming industry going back almost 50 years. It’s a history that may have been overlooked, but Vancouver’s footprint in the world of gaming is substantial.
At Press Start: A Vancouver Game History Pop-Up, that impact is finally given its due. Running through October (extended to November 7 at date of publication) at the Museum of Vancouver, the exhibition is the first project presented by the Canadian Video Game Museum, helmed by Ryan Dunnison, a game designer and educator, along with his team from the Centre for Digital Media.
Conceptually, the CVGM—described as “a pioneering initiative dedicated to celebrating and preserving Canada’s contributions to video games”—had been percolating with Dunnison since 2016. Back then, he was collecting classic game consoles such as the Coleco Telstar Alpha (1977), ColecoVision (1982), and Gemini (1983) to share with students in his video game history class at LaSalle College. When an opportunity arose to share those pieces of hardware at a Sci-Fi Collector Day at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, the success of the showcase “sparked a realization” that there was a local appetite for more. Unsure how to get a bigger project such as a permanent museum off the ground, he turned his attention to research.
According to Dunnison’s continually expanding database, around 340 video game software and hardware companies have called the Lower Mainland home. If you were a gamer in the 1980s or early 1990s, you might be familiar with the work of one of the first: the Gravis GamePad, one of the most popular PC gaming controllers of its day, designed and manufactured by Advanced Gravis Computer Technology in Burnaby. Perhaps you slammed the controller’s candy-coloured buttons in delight or frustration while playing the early and innovative title Evolution.
Published by Vancouver-based Sydney Development Corp. in 1982, Evolution was the work of two teenage programmers, Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember. The game, as its title suggests, progresses players through levels that mirror evolution: an amoeba becomes a frog, then a rodent, beaver, gorilla, and finally, a human. It was a financial success, selling more than 400,000 copies. It was also the first rung on the evolutionary ladder for Vancouver’s video game industry.
Mattrick and Sember went on to start their own game development studio, Distinctive Software, which was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1991. Thirty-five years later, EA is one of the top game publishers and development companies in the world thanks to contributions from its Vancouver studio, which produces EA Sports titles including FC, NHL, UFC, and more. Between then and now, whole ecosystems of Vancouver-based game companies emerged, faltered, and thrived.
There were big players—Radical Entertainment and Rockstar Vancouver were responsible for bestselling titles The Simpsons: Hit & Run (2003) and Bully (2006) respectively. Educational software producers such as Ingenuity Works (makers of 1989’s All the Right Type) found a home in classrooms around the country.
The advent of mobile game development led to the rise of studios including East Side Games and PopCap Vancouver, the latter a subsidiary of EA that was behind the megahit Plants vs. Zombies. Once publishing became more accessible on consoles and PC via online stores, indie outfits such as Extremely OK Games, makers of the critical and financial success Celeste (2018), and Sunset Visitor, which created the Peabody Award-winning 1000xResist (2024), became a force on the scene.
“We realized that we are the only country in the top 10 countries for game development that doesn’t have any form of permanent video game museum.” —Ryan Dunnison
Vancouver’s imprint on the global gaming community solidified with works made with a scrappy do-it-yourself ethos—an attitude matched by Dunnison’s own: Press Start is a charmingly lo-fi effort. Most of the exhibit’s display cases were built by Dunnison, and the majority of the era-spanning pieces on show are from his own collection. Even an interactive display that allows viewers to hold their hand over a sensor and manipulate digital versions of a series of classic consoles, view them at all angles, and open them up to take a look at the circuitry inside was constructed by Dunnison and his team.
With little budget, the team volunteered their time and dug into their own pockets to take these first steps toward the creation of the CVGM, a commitment they hope will propel it from a pop-up to a permanent location.
“As we looked at the research, we realized that we are the only country in the top 10 countries for game development that doesn’t have any form of permanent video game museum,” Dunnison explains. He also believes that a permanent museum, beyond preserving history and educating the public, can serve another purpose for the wider industry at large.
“Museums are in this really unique space where they bridge all three major parts of the video game industry. It bridges the consumer with the product and the companies.… It can also interface directly with government.
“Our focus has mostly been on how we can educate and where we can start trying to get more information to build up better backing of history,” he says, but “here in this province, we’re not really competitive with our main competitor from a grants and tax perspective.” His hope is that exhibitions such as Press Start can inspire those in power.
Press Start also gives space to another organization whose goal is to celebrate the local industry. Vancouver Game Garden held its third annual event in June and packed the exhibition hall at the Roundhouse Community Centre. Greg Lobanov, one of VGG’s organizers and the indie developer behind the BAFTA-winning Chicory: A Colorful Tale, said that after attending the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival in May 2024, he and some friends threw around the possibility of doing something similar for independent games in the city.
“Anybody we even whispered the idea to was like, ‘Yes, we need this. I’ve been waiting for this.’” By August of that year, VGG had held its first event. A rapid turnaround, but Lobanov and his friends agreed: “Either we’re going to do it, or we’re going to procrastinate, and we’ll never do it. So let’s just do it.”
Three years in, it’s been a success by all measures: great turnouts of industry, gamers, and the curious, all helping to bring the Vancouver gaming community together in a new and important way.
“We don’t want to be a big convention centre event. We don’t want people to have to take a trip out of the city to get there either. The point is to be in the middle of everything, in a community space. That’s what we want to be,” Lobanov says.
Walking through Press Start, you can feel the CVGM’s own “let’s just do it” attitude. Dunnison himself may give you a guided tour of the exhibition, and you might catch him tweaking the displays as you go, getting them just right. It’s a project born of a love of video games and a desire to show people that so much of the joy they’ve experienced through them can be traced back here, to the city of Vancouver.
