UK’s only videogame museum opens
A videogame museum which is the only one of its kind in the UK has opened at its new base in Sheffield this weekend.
The National Videogame Museum – based in the new tech hub at Castle House, the former Co-Op building – has playable consoles and arcade machines with classics such as Space Invaders and PacMan. It was previously based in Nottingham but its move was announced over the summer as part of a merger of the British Games Institute (BGI) and National Videogame Foundation.
It is hoped the museum, which celebrates videogame culture, will attract 50,000 people to the city every year. Over the weekend it has showcased a selection of titles made in Sheffield including Snake Pass, Monty Mole and Gang Beasts.
The NVM is run by a non-profit Community Interest Company – The National Videogame Foundation – operated by the BGI, an agency for games culture, which is raising funding for games skills, culture, diversity and production in collaboration with other organisations.
Ian Livingstone, NVM Patron & BGI Chair, said: “The NVM is the games industry’s own museum, celebrating our games, our studios and our sector’s achievements over 40 years. I invite anyone who cares about the cultural life of video games to join leaders from across the industry and support this amazing project with content, evangelism and funding to help expand the programme in the years to come.”
The world’s first cultural centre dedicated to videogames opened its doors in Nottingham in 2015. Within two years of opening it had welcomed 100,000 visitors.
It was in 2017 that BGI, a new agency for games culture, mirroring the British Film Institute but for games, was set up. It won its first funding in early 2018, and merged with the National Videogame Foundation, which ran the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham, in June.
The BGI runs a range of educational programmes around games culture, research, production, skills and diversity.
