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Van Burnham — Supercade, Abscam, and the Museum That Should Already Exist Van Burnham has spent three decades making the argument that video games are a legitimate art form — pretty much before anyone wanted to hear it. She's the author of Supercade (MIT Press), one of the most important books ever written about this medium
Time: 1:17:15
Van Burnham has spent three decades making the argument that video games are a legitimate art form — pretty much before anyone wanted to hear it. She's the author of Supercade (MIT Press), one of the most important books ever written about this medium. She has collected nearly 500 arcade machines, interviewed the people who built this industry from the ground up, and is now working to build what she hopes will be gaming's first world-class museum.
In this conversation, Van and Greg cover her origin story — born in Raleigh, raised in Cary (now home to Epic Games), then New Jersey, where her dad brought home an Odyssey when she was five — and the mall arcade in Cherry Hill that Supercade is actually named after. She talks about arriving at Wired in the mid-90s as the default "games evangelist," the leap from magazine writing to a publishing deal with MIT, and what it took to track down the last known Abscam cabinet — a Pac-Man clone inspired by the 1980 FBI sting, made in the same Amityville town as the Amityville Horror.
They also get into the preservation crisis: how operators destroyed unprofitable cabinets, how the game industry still doesn't fund preservation the way film and music do, why the "ephemeral age" essay in Supercade Volume 2 should be required reading, and how the new deluxe edition of the original book finally lives up to the sequel.
By the end of the episode, you understand why a museum isn't a vanity project. It's a rescue operation.
About re:Play: Long-form conversations with the people who built this industry — peer to peer, not press to talent. Hosted by Greg Off.
Find Van: supercademuseum.org · shop.supercade.com
Find re:Play: replaypodcast.com · Substack: gregoff1.substack.com
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Release Date: 23/06/2026, 14:00:00
