Reader, listen up. This is me being serious. In fact, I’m writing this from my serious room. It’s where I come to be serious. The table I’m sat at is the most serious table I could find. I looked at many, many tables. Hundreds of tables. It’s possible I looked at over a thousand tables. I honestly don’t know. The specific number isn’t as important as the understanding that of all of the tables I looked at, this one is the most serious. I relate this story to impress upon you the extent to which this is the most serious room I have, which is why I’ve brought you all here. Because today, we’re discussing something supremely, tremendously unfunny: the Ukraine-Russian war.
Russian bombing of the museum
We here at Mega Visions share in the grief and sorrow felt by hundreds of Ukrainians as the Russian assault rages onwards, marking the greatest act of geopolitical terror in Europe since the Second World War. We urge our readers to contribute to the humanitarian efforts of Western nations if they have the capacity (and are so inclined) and wish, as most do, for a swift and diplomatic end to the conflict. All that being said, you may be wondering what tenuous connection this tragedy could have to the usual levity we promote around here.
Well, there is one – and it’s a thoroughly depressing one, to toss onto an ever-growing pile of depressing things the last month has served up on a faeces-stained silver platter. As GameRant reports, Russian bombing strikes in the port town of Mariupol have struck the Computer Museum there; a “privately owned collection of over 500 items of retro computing, consoles and technology from the 1950s to the early 2000s,” the museum was almost two decades in the making.
The Mariupol Computer Museum’s history
Though the owner, passionate tech-savvy curator Dmitry Cherepanov, has managed to find safety in the attack, he is devastated at his personal project going up in smoke. Check out the Tweet which broke the news below:
Cherepanov, who made his home in the building while accumulating its contents, “was not only the museum’s proprietor, but also restored many items in the collection himself.” This has made its destruction sting all the harder, a fact he makes clear in a Facebook post about the incident: “all that is left from my collection, that I have been collecting for 15 years, is just fragments of memories.”
Keeping history alive
Compared to other entertainment mediums like film and television, video gaming is still very much in its infancy, yet has developed so much rich history in this short time period. Likewise, games hardware is rendered obsolete with relative frequency, and often production runs of certain systems are brief. It’s for these reasons, and more, that preserving that history is of vital importance, and senseless acts such as this do little to assist in that endeavour.
To be clear, the museum’s destruction in no way compares to the overall scale and implications of the war, but it is just another needless casualty of a needless conflict. As gamers and retro fans, all of us, we feel your pain, Dmitry. Hopefully, one day you’ll build a new collection from the ashes of this one – and I’ll personally buy the first ticket on opening day. Best wishes, mate.
Do you concur in our sympathies for Cherepanov and Ukraine? Share your thoughts with us below or on socials.
Via, GameRant.
