A museum dedicated to the history of home video games and computers is taking shape in Penn Hills.
In mid-February, Brendan Becker opened the first rooms of his Bloop Museum in the township’s former municipal building along Frankstown Road. For now, it is open to walk-ins from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays and scheduled tours as work on the collection and building continues.
“I hope that people visit and see what we have to offer,” said Becker, a video game music composer. “It’s a living museum. I want people to come every month to see what’s new.”
Donations to the nonprofit museum are accepted in lieu of an admission charge.
What’s currently on view begins in the former council chambers, the largest room in the building, where a computer history display includes machines from the likes of Commodore, Apple, Radio Shack, Texas Instruments, Atari and IBM from 1977 to 1998.
A room is set up to represent the 1980s, including a console television with an Atari 2600 Video Computer System hooked up to it.
There are displays devoted to piracy, hacking and emulation, along with graphics and sound. Computers and game systems from around the world comprise an “international zone,” with Japan having a room of its own.
Two more rooms, a 1990s-themed room featuring the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System and a larger, dedicated video game history room, are expected to be completed by the end of March.
Most of the computers and game consoles displayed at the museum still work. But unlike other museums, which are “look but don’t touch,” it’s OK to touch at Bloop — just ask first.
“Most people hear the word ‘museum,’ they think stuff sitting behind glass that you can’t interact with,” said Lincoln Roop, 36, a museum volunteer from Greenfield. “The thing about computers and technology is they’re functional art. To really appreciate why this stuff is historically significant, it needs to be working and people need to be able to interact with it.”
Much of the building is still a work in progress as Becker wraps up moving his massive collection from the Baltimore area to Penn Hills and works on the building. He anticipates a grand opening for the completed first floor next year.
Becker now resides in Greenfield with Roop and his wife, Shelby Cunningham. They have known Becker for about 10 years since they were undergrads at Carnegie Mellon University and brought Becker in to perform at Demosplash, a computer artwork and retro gaming event at CMU.
Becker plans to live in an apartment at the museum, which he runs with two others outside the area. While he has no employees, he’s had dozens of people reach out since word of his move to the Pittsburgh area broke and about a half-dozen come on weekends to help.
Ethan Cox, 40, a video game collector who lives in Patton Township, has been coming to Penn Hills from his home near State College a few times a month since last summer to help set up the museum. He met Becker and learned about Bloop at the 2024 Pittsburgh Gaming Expo in Monroeville, where Becker gave a presentation.
“I think it’s amazing that he’s actually able to do this,” Cox said. “It’s something people probably didn’t realize there could be a museum of. There’s museums for military and film and art and books, but nobody thinks of what about electronics, what about video games. In a way, that’s also a type of art. Just having a museum that for a lot of people seems completely out of left field, something they would never think about, that’s going to spark a lot of interest.”
The people of Penn Hills have been “warm and welcoming,” Becker said.
“Everyone’s been nice. I love it. It feels good,” he said. “It feels like I made the right choice.”
Becker, 46, a native of Chicago who grew up in Idaho, started the museum, composed largely of his personal collection, in 2007 and gave it the name Bloop — a backward acronym for Brendan’s Library of Obscure and Obsolete Peripherals — in 2016. It incorporated as a nonprofit in 2022.
The museum began as a room at MAGFest, an annual music and gaming festival in National Harbor, Md., before becoming a year-round part of the System Source Computer Museum in Hunt Valley, Md., north of Baltimore.
His search for a place of his own, based on price and size, initially gave him buildings in spots such as Oregon, West Virginia, Alabama, Florida and Georgia that weren’t where he wanted to be — an area “with a lot of nerds,” colleges and near civilization but not in the middle of it.
Increasing his price range brought up the former Penn Hills municipal building, which he kept an eye on and looked at after the price dropped. He ultimately bought the 40,000-square-foot building for $370,000 in May 2025.
“I’m not going to say I fell in love with it. I saw we could do what we wanted to do here,” he said. “Now that I’m in my own space, I’m in control.”
The building was in rough shape, requiring asbestos abatement and repair of broken pipes. The HVAC did not work — the original part built in 1939 now has it, while the 1967 addition doesn’t yet.
The building is bigger than what Becker originally had in mind, but that’s OK.
“It gives me room to grow, which is good,” he said. “It’s very easy to get lost in here.”
On the not-yet-finished first floor, Becker plans to create a faux video rental store. He also will move the computer history display out of council chambers so it can be used as a community events space.
Space on the second floor will be used for taking in donations, an archival lab for scanning and preservation, a repair lab and an area dedicated to multiplayer gaming.
“Being able to do this a piece at a time is a huge strength of Brendan’s, that he’s able to see the bigger picture yet start small and get something open and be part of the community and get more people excited about it,” Roop said.
Becker anticipates the full build-out to take about four years to complete.
“Hopefully, it will become more than the sum of its parts,” he said.
