This is incredible – a story of a museum exhibit that replicated an experience of being a tech support person for a videogame company some time in the early 1990s:

You knew hint lines existed, right? 1-900 numbers, long-distance charges, hoping whoever answers actually knows what they’re talking about. They had incomplete documentation, contradictory notes, whatever the previous shift scribbled down. Nintendo’s Power Line is probably the most famous example. There’s a few great videos floating around about them.

The team invented a few new games (“We weren’t just making a game about hint lines. We were making the games that would’ve required hint lines to exist in the first place”), a few personas, and put together a 300-page realistic binder:

The entire story is so worth a read.

Looking back, we think ACMI said yes because we pitched infrastructure, not nostalgia. If you’re old enough, you probably remember that hint lines existed. We wanted people to experience what it was like to be part of that system.
[…]
Next time you tab over to a wiki page or watch a YouTube guide, spare a thought for hint line counselors of the early 1990s, armed with incomplete documentation, good intentions, and hope that the person on the other end was asking about a game they’d actually played. They were unsung heroes of gaming’s most chaotic era, and now, for a few minutes at least, you can experience their particular brand of helpful desperation firsthand.

The exhibit is still available at ACMI in Melbourne until March this year, “along with a life-size usable corporate cubicle (with a dead plant!) and matching hardware straight from the ’90s.”

You can also play it online, although the team warns: “Online is not the intended experience. Flipping through the physical artifact is half the fun.”

This, by the way, is why ACMI is one of my fav tech museums.