What does that mean? At the MADE, nearly every wall is covered in video games. Yellow Nintendo 64 boxes, neon-green Xbox cases, big black chunky consoles from the Nixon era: They’re not hidden behind cases or raised out of reach, but right there for the taking. Here’s an Ikea bookshelf filled with Gameboy cartridges. Here’s another one with what could be every Playstation title. And here are glass cases—that can be easily opened—with every portable handheld you ever pined after. And, core to the MADE’s philosophy, every game can be played by anyone who walks in the door.

“If you see a game you want to play, you just ask the staff and they try to set it up the best they can,” Alex Handy, the MADE’s founder and director, told me. “When it comes to Nintendo games, there’s a whole lot of blowing into the cartridge.”

The MADE’s collection spans almost 50 years, from the dawn of home game consoles in 1972 to the present day. It includes the Magnavox Odyssey, a glorified board game that required a TV; the Atari 2600, the first console; many, many Pongs—“there were dozens and dozens and dozens of Pongs back in the day,” says Handy—up to the Xbox and PS2.

Handy, an enterprise-software journalist during the day, founded the MADE five years ago. He has assembled its collection as he goes. It started when he discovered a tranche of undiscovered Atari 2600 games, including Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventure in the Park, at a flea market at nearby Laney College. (C.P.K.:A.I.T.P. is now playable online.) When GamePro magazine went out of business in 2011, he inherited their library of games and their archive of games journalism. (Another room has a wall of old game magazines—the last and only record, in many cases, of titles from the Eighties and Nineties that were never released.)

The museum’s collection includes the unconventional. On the top of one shelf sits the Coleco Adam, perhaps the world’s only combination PC-and-console. Manufactured by Coleco, the same company that made Cabbage Patch Kids, it may be the most essentially 1980s device ever seen. The Coleco Adam was so poorly made that, if someone inserted a cassette tape into its tape deck, it was immediately degaussed, Handy said. It flopped upon release in 1983.

The MADE also holds a Gizmondo, produced by an organization that Handy described as a real-life version of The Producers, they made a handheld console, not a musical. And it had connections to the Swedish mafia.

The museum is more than a playable games library. It holds weekly free computer classes for local kids in its computer lab. And it is stewarded by a set of volunteers who seem as important to the museum’s feel as its collection. Chris Wolf, the museum’s curator, was preparing an exhibit on visuals in video games while I was there; he began working at the museum when, as a visitor, he noticed some of its collections were out of alphabetical order. After he sorted the games, Handy asked him to come on full-time.