This article aims to reopen the genealogy of video games, studying the similarities they share with what the author calls ‘techno-trance devices’. These devices, which are contemporary to the first video games in the early 1960s, rely on the creative hijacking of laboratory instruments. They share numerous technical and media properties with video games. Moreover, there are some records of these techno-trance devices being used during religious practices at the time, which might lead to speculation of a latent trance influence in video games as apparatuses. These shared properties between video games and these devices, derived from counterculture, are thus studied through the prism of trance and the debates it fostered in anthropology.