Valve representatives will be in Vancouver this weekend talking about the Bellevue, Washington–based company’s work on a virtual-reality headset.

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It isn’t easy letting others play with your favourite things, especially if they’re breakable. But that’s what makes Evolution of Gaming unique. Unlike other exhibitions of video games from the past, this one is entirely hands-on.

“I think it’s important that people touch these things,” Kimberly Voll said on the phone from her office at the Centre for Digital Media. “I want them to feel this history, and have a visceral experience that helps connect the dots from what we have today back to how we started.”

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Also: Play over 40 retro titles at Centre for Digital Media’s Evolution of Gaming exhibit

Gaslamp Games its existence to a video game that was never released. It wasn’t even completed. But trying to make it taught the Vancouver-based company’s founders—David Baumgart, Daniel Jacobsen, and Nicholas Vining—an important lesson about the process of making games.

“We had no concept of managing projects,” Jacobsen said. The game they thought they could make was far too big and unwieldy for a small group to ever complete. Having ideas that are too massive to manage is, according to Jacobsen, a “classic problem” for very small game development studios. “It took us six months to learn that lesson,” he said.

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If there is one obstacle independent developers must overcome, it’s how to get their games into the hands of players. You might have created the best game ever made, but if nobody can buy and play it, what’s the point?

Prior to digital distribution, video game publishers controlled this aspect of the business because they had relationships with the retailers that sold games. Getting a national electronics chain to carry your indie title was a long shot without the support of an Activision or Electronic Arts.

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Watch Dogs IS the video game of our time. Steeped in themes of privacy and surveillance, it was based on reality when it was conceived some five years ago, according to creative director Jonathan Morin.

But WikiLeaks’ release of diplomatic cables and the revelations of National Security Agency whistle blower Edward Snowden have popularized the concepts that the game explores.

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