Casino Museums all Over the World

More and more casinos house galleries or have artistic installations. Take for instance Bodies: the Exhibition in Luxor Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas strip, which is rather provocative. In case you haven’t heard of it, this is a collection of 13 whole-body specimen from China and more than 260 organs…yes, real people who decided to donate their bodies for scientific purposes. There’s even a room showing fetal development, that stages the growth of a baby from eight weeks to eleven months. Some people say this is quite shocking, others insist on it being informative and fascinating. We’ll let you decide on your own. But let’s now move on to another type of casino museums, these are not just museums located in a casino. They are museums of arcade games and gambling machines. One of them we really liked but is permanently closed was the Nevada Gambling Museum, which housed 100 antique slot machines, cheating devices and gamblers’ weapons. The other two are to be found on places we do not usually connect with gambling. Have a look below:

German Museum for Machines – Espelkamp – Germany – ‘Deutsches Automaten Museum’ as the German name of the museum is exhibits around 200 different machines from the private collection of the Gauselmann family. There are slots, vending machines, pinball, jukeboxes even wheels of fortune but the collection itself is much bigger – there are more than 1800 exhibits. There are 7 different collections and the one we are interested in is “Chance and Gambling”. You will be able to see an original Owl slot, dating back to 1897 and produced by the famous Mills Novelty Company in Chicago. The Sputnik slot machine was produced in 1960 in Bingen Germany and it is dedicated to the flight of the first satellite in space. And also, you can find there Mercur B – the first self-developed and self-produced gaming machine that became iconic for the German gamblers. It was produced by the Gauselmann family in 1977 and more than 2 million of such games were to follow in the next decades.

Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines – Moscow – Russia – This one even has a super interactive website which is full of old-school arcade games that you can actually play on your computer. And although this is not technically a gambling museum, we liked the idea so much, that we wanted to share it with you. The land-based museum is in Moscow, it opened doors 3 years ago and you can visit it every day from 11am till 8pm. You can actually go there and play on the old machines. How nostalgic is that? There is a game we want to present you here. It is called “Morskoi Boi”(Sea Battle) where you are in a submarine and you aim your cannon at an enemy ship. And although the graphics are super primitive compared to the modern games, this game is super fun!