30 years of the Playstation: Namco Museum

On September 9, 2025, the Sony Playstation will turn 30 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be exclusively covering games released for Sony’s first entry in the console market, with an emphasis on those that explain, in some way, its unprecedented success. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Unless you are very new to reading my work — and I mean within the past couple of weeks levels of new — then you’re likely aware of how I feel about classic Namco titles. You can blame the copy of Galaga for the Atari 7800 that I received as a hand me down in the very early 90s for the start of this, and if my six-year-old who is obsessed with Pac-Man and Sky Kid and Mappy is any indication, I’ve already passed this particular disease on.

What has made me — and in turn, at least one of my children — into Namco obsessives is the fact that these games, some of them older than me and all of them older than him, are around at all in the present. And while it’s no longer the lone venue for Namco’s re-releases — thank you, Hamster and Arcade Archives — the ground zero for this is Namco Museum on the Playstation.

Namco certainly didn’t invent the idea of keeping their past alive, and they weren’t the first company to release compilations of their previous work, either. There is something about Namco Museum that stuck, though, and resonated long-term in a way that, say, the Williams/Midway Arcade Greatest Hits have not. Part of that is the fact that Namco is persistent and consistent when it comes to keeping their Namco Museum series alive and, ever since its second run, on multiple platforms, whereas thinking about the last time we got a proper Midway compilation is a little depressing. But it’s also because the games are just that incredible, whether because they remain an approachable joy to play in the way that the very best arcade games tend to over time, or because of how obviously vital they are to the growth of video games and their direction. Having great stuff available means chances to play great stuff, and it’s pretty easy to make a connection with it from there.

What’s a little funny about writing about Namco Museum during a Playstation anniversary month, however, is that, at least outside of Japan, these collections weren’t particularly celebrated. The mid-90s were a time of looking down on anything that could not be deemed cutting edge, to the point that you had criticisms of side-scrolling Nintendo 64 games for not giving you a 3D playground to run around in, or Sega Saturn games that did 2D things with 32-bit hardware that would have been impossible on 16-bit predecessors being misunderstood as technically deficient and outdated in some way. You can imagine how some critics reacted to seeing some of these 1980s Namco titles packaged together at that point in time, especially since these same critics didn’t necessarily have the bandwidth to fully engage with all of what was included in order to fully review or understand its appeal or its history — which, in the case of certain towering achievements in the field that to that point had only released in Japan, was necessary.

Now, this is not the same thing as saying that everyone was critical of the existence of Namco Museum, or that no one enjoyed any of these games, or anything of that sort. There was just some pushback, is all, but people did buy enough of Namco Museum Vol. 1 that North America not only saw releases through Vol. 5, but also greatest hits re-releases of Namco Museum titles. There was an audience out there for these games, still ready to pounce on their past or introduce it to their kids or check out these arcade titles they had heard so much about for the first time. And there still is today.

Namco Museum has been a gift, basically, and it was never better than in its original form. That’s because Namco actually treated the release like an interactive museum: you didn’t “just” have the games included, but they were placed inside traversable theme rooms, housed inside of a 3D, open-world museum. These rooms were stuffed full of promotional materials, arcade cabinet artwork, and, in what ended up being very, very important for some of these titles (I already linked The Tower of Druaga above, but I might as well spell it out here, too) instructions, tips, and tricks to help you make it through. You didn’t just boot up Pac-Man and go, but instead got a sense of the moment that surrounded Pac-Man: there’s a significant difference there, and one that it’s a shame that Namco has never bothered going back to, given how much it makes those particular titles stand out.

Which is not to say that modern Namco Museums are poor excuses of the form, by any means, and they have their own charms in this always-connected present, like online leaderboards for games that released five decades ago. But it would be something else to be able to dive into a virtual museum once more, to see people experiencing these games for the first time able to do so in the way that people in the mid-90s did when Namco Museum was first introduced on the Playstation. My kids aren’t reading my work and pulling in context for The Legend of Valkyrie from there, you know? Let the people who made the game do some of that heavy lifting in the years before I’m handing them the keys to the internet.

Namco Museum was a five-game series in North America, while Japan had a sixth game that came out in late-1997 after Namco had announced that they were done with this. Calling it “Namco Museum Encore” was fitting then, since encores are so often part of a not-so-elaborate lie. If you have ever played any Namco Museum title and had a look at what was available, then you likely have a good idea of what was included in these compilations. Namco dug pretty deep here, though, especially since there were five (or six) titles, so the entire run has a lot more going for it than more modern iterations: there is a price difference, yes, but the 2017 Namco Museum for Switch had 11 games on it for $30, whereas, in total, Volumes 1 through 5 included a total of 31 games, and 38 if you include Encore’s selections.

Vol. 1 included Pac-Man, Rally-X, its updated form of New Rally-X, Galaga, Bosconian, Pole Position, and Toy Pop. That’s some extreme heavy hitters in Pac-Man, Galaga, and Pole Position, with some comparatively less successful — but still fun — games in the Rally-Xs and Bosconian, and then Toy Pop, which got more attention by being included in this compilation than it ever did in arcades. Vol 2. featured the Breakout-slash-pinball game, Cutie-Q, one of the most important games in history in Xevious, the underrated Mappy, Galaga sequel Gaplus, multidirectional shooter and Xevious spin-off Grobda, the highly influential but lesser-known Dragon Buster, and Cutie-Q predecessor Bomb Bee as a hidden title (but only in Japan).

Vol 3. went back to the beginning with Galaxian, Pac-Man’s superior sequel, Ms. Pac-Man, one of their very best arcade titles, Dig Dug, the Japanese-exclusive Phozon, Pole Position II, and the first international release of The Tower of Druaga, which remains underappreciated to this day — especially since its first standalone release overseas lacked any of the instructional help that this Museum entry was full of. Hey, want to see something fun?

Notice that The Tower of Druaga listing is off to the bottom right, last among the “Also Includes” section. Maybe that’s not that surprising, considering, but it wasn’t always treated like that. As I pointed out at Endless Mode (née Paste Games) last year for Druaga’s 40th anniversary:

Listen, I’ll stop bringing this stuff up when you all agree that Druaga rocks.

Anyway. Vol. 4 featured early platformer Pac-Land, Druaga sequel and co-op adventure The Return of Ishtar, The Genji and the Heike Clans, Ordyne, Assault, and Assault Plus as a hidden game. This was by far the most digging deep of the volumes to that point, but that showed a commitment that’s appreciated, especially considering the virtual museum setup of the original. Vol. 5 continued the trend, rolling with platformer Metro Cross, the run-and-gun adventure of Mr. Driller’s mother, Baraduke, shooting game Dragon Spirit, Pac-Mania, and The Legend of Valkyrie in its still superior home release form — the game has been re-released on Arcade Archives in the present, but untranslated. Namco went through the trouble of localizing the entire thing here, as well as setting it up to look natural on a television screen rather than a TATE-oriented arcade cabinet.

Encore pulled out King & Balloon, Motos, Sky Kid, Rolling Thunder, Wonder Momo, Rompers, and Dragon Saber, rounding out a stunning series of nearly 40 games that ranged from Namco’s most famous to some that all but the most dedicated fans of the company had maybe never even heard of before. Thanks to Arcade Archives, we now have this level of availability in the present, but previously this was something of a singular moment: Namco Museums that came after this bunch tended to be more like that of the last full release on the Switch in terms of depth of selections.

To further highlight this, the original Namco Museum release of Toy Pop in Vol. 1 remains the only such release of it in the series. The same goes for Bomb Bee in Vol. 2, Phozon in Vol. 3, Assault and Assault Plus in Vol. 4, The Legend of Valkyrie in Vol. 5, and Wonder Momo and Rompers in Encore. Namco has never bothered revisiting any of those games in their Museum series, despite it now being 30 years since it launched. Luckily, again, some of these are available via Arcade Archives now, but the point was that Namco never quite did Namco Museum like they originally had on the Playstation, where they dug deep enough to start to get even more strange looks from critics in terms of what was being put on these compilations.

Namco Museums have existed in every console (and handheld) era since the original Playstation release 30 years ago, and multiplatform each time. My hope is that, even in this era of wider releases for classic arcade titles via Hamster, that Namco doesn’t slack on putting effort into future Namco Museum games. So many of my now-favorite Namco titles were not experienced for the first time — or ever — in an arcade itself. I have Namco Museum releases for every piece of hardware I own that saw a release of one. If the modern quality of life options and online leaderboards could be combined with a virtual museum setup once again? I’m sure I’m not alone in being willing to fork over cash for another multi-volume set in the present, especially if Namco takes the time to do things like localize and optimize games like The Legend of Valkyrie once more.

Arcade Archives is wonderful, of course, and I’ve fallen in love with plenty of Namco titles from their “lesser” Museum collections, but there is something to giving these games just that extra level of care and attention in the present that would go a long way toward ensuring there are a lot more of me out there in the future. And if you’re constantly peddling in the past, shouldn’t that be the goal?

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