‘Games are a work of art’ – Inside the new museum that pits Mario against Michelangelo

Rome, the cradle of Western civilization and home to world-famous historical artifacts from thousands of years of human history, is an ambitious place to launch a gaming museum. Local competition is as strong as they come.

In 2012, VIGAMUS did it anyway, based on the conviction – expressed by director Marco Accordi Rickards – that games should be considered in the same way as more traditional museum material. “Games are a work of art that expresses culture,” he says. “A video game is exactly the same as a novel or a play, just a different form of art, with that extra element of gameplay.”

Twelve years and two million visitors later, it has received new investment, a new name and a new location at the center of this UNESCO World Heritage site. Walking through it a few days before the Nov. 30 opening date, the main floor looks more like a traditional museum exhibit.

Glass display cases displaying consoles, giant boxes from the heyday of multi-disc PC gaming, and a seemingly random selection of artifacts: Atari copies of ET dug up in the New Mexico desert; storyboards for the unloved adventure game Druuna: Morbus Gravis; development assets for Kena: Bridge of Spirits. A side room houses a series of classic arcade machines and lower level demo stations for consoles, PCs and retro consoles.

It is a modestly sized combination of exhibition and play space that attempts to be more of a cultural center than a series of static exhibits, reflecting lessons learned from the previous incarnation. “VIGAMUS was a super long 12-year beta test to do this,” says Rickards, sitting on a small stage at the back of a quintessentially Roman venue: formerly some ancient commercial units, but a stone’s throw from the Piazza della Republica . and overlooking an obelisk from the reign of Ramses II.

“We learned a lot. We have learned that people – and I think this is fair – expect that in a games museum they will be able to play a lot. I think it’s very important because you can’t experience games without playing them. Interactivity is the one thing that many would say sets games apart from all other media.”

GAMM has therefore added the theatrically titled spaces Path of Arcadia and Historical Playground: a collection of arcade machines and game consoles, respectively, partly intended to cater to what the team hopes will be a broader audience provided by its new position in the heart of the city center, crowded with tourists. But it’s the main area, GAMMDome, that offers what they consider GAMM’s key feature: Instead of printed text signage, the area is flanked by pairs of digital screens, the lower one displaying historical information and the upper one a series of talks. of game creators.

Recorded remotely and exclusively for the museum, and primarily in English, they feature a wide range of faces, from textual adventure figurehead Steve Meretzky and Bioware founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk to Arrowhead’s Johan Pilestadt and the champion of the African industry Hugo Obi. There are more in production, from luminaries such as Tim Sweeney and Peter Molyneux, and they are expected to form an ever-updating backdrop.

“We wanted to have a space that was up to date with the industry and could also showcase the people behind the games,” says CEO Eva Sturlese. “From an authorial point of view, but also artistic, narrative, etc. The concept is that there is space for everyone to appear, but also to contribute to the awareness behind video games as a cultural medium, which of course is one of our missions in general.

“We wanted to have a space that was up to date with the industry and could also showcase the people behind the games. From an authorial point of view, but also artistic, narrative, etc.”

“Games change,” adds Rickards. “We can’t have a museum that, after a year, is not updated enough to tell the story of the games. “We like the fact that we can continue working on this project, it is constantly changing.” Creating content for the system requires a lot of work for the museum’s curators, but they are excited about its potential.

It’s easy to visualize the screens being used to tell an in-depth story of a platform or genre, with professionally filmed interviews (rather than the Zoom aesthetic of launch content) and exhibits lined up to match. An initial plan for 2025 is to focus on the Italian game development scene, Rickards says, with interviews with local creators aligned with exhibits including development documents and development kits.

Meanwhile, the exhibits currently dedicated to local development are surprisingly few, although the museum has been partly funded by Milestone, the venerable Italian racing game studio now owned by Embracer Group, and they have been rewarded with a dedicated section in the basement. Play space that includes artifacts from the development of their 1995 debut Screamer. Embracer CEO Luisa Bixio is an enthusiastic supporter of the museum and, like Ricards, is optimistic on the Italian development scene: the post-study Davide Soliari’s Rabbids is a source of particular excitement.

The team aims to “emphasize the value of what we do in our country,” says Rickards, and GAMM has been designed to function as a venue for this as well. The stage at the rear is located in an area where the display cases will be equipped with wheels, allowing the space to be reconfigured to accommodate a boardroom table or other furniture. The hope is that GAMM will serve as a place for both the industry and the community to host events, with the latter in particular having less and less shared space as both arcades and brick-and-mortar stores have disappeared.

The current programming does a good job of showing the history of the medium. The arcade machines have been selected to highlight the “golden age” of 1978 to 1984, with more recent releases included to demonstrate the evolution since then.

The lower level gaming area is designed to showcase the breadth of home gaming platforms, with a mix of current hardware and recent retro re-releases like the SNES mini and Kickstarted remakes of the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The original items are confined to display cases on the main level, for fear they will not survive if left in the public’s hands.

“The hope is that GAMM will serve as a place for both the industry and the community to host events, with the latter in particular having less and less shared space as both arcades and brick-and-mortar stores have disappeared.”

This is an understandable precaution, although it undermines the historical value of the exhibition. Curators plan to use guided tours and display screens to fill the gap, allowing them to show off things like the Dreamcast VMU or the experience of loading C64 games from cassette tapes without putting the museum’s collection at risk.

The focus is on storytelling rather than preservation, a hot topic that Rickards prefers to leave to other members of the European Federation of Archives, Museums and Games Preservation Projects (EFGAMP), which includes Berlin’s ComputerSpiele museum. and the National Video Games Museum in the United Kingdom. “Some European entities are much stronger and dedicated to the preservation of specific games, and we like the idea of ​​working together with them,” he says.

“We don’t compete with them. Our role is probably strongest in the field of dissemination, making people understand the culture and artistic value of games and the idea of ​​the physical labor behind games: that they are not just electronic toys, but works of art made by people.”

It’s a noble goal, and while GAMM doesn’t have the resources of its neighboring museums, even in its initial state there are the bones of something powerful, enough to make you wish London had something similar. Rickards has some ideas on this, with “plans to expand this format and maybe launch new GAMMs elsewhere, in different countries. It is a format that could be replicated, not in exactly the same way, but where you get the specific flavor of that country.”

Compared to this year’s other big release, Nintendo Museum Kyoto, GAMM is the brave standalone release instead of the AAA console. It lacks the scale and presentation that Nintendo offers, but it’s built with heart and passion, showing a broader range of gaming history and the faces of the people who built it.

It is also, going back to Rickards’ game developer analogy, something of an early access release: up and running but with much bigger features in the works, which he himself acknowledges. “We’ll definitely have a day one patch,” he laughs. “We have already seen many things that we must fix. We are ugly at the moment, but we can grow a lot and improve a lot.”