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

Rome, the birthplace of Western civilisation and home to world-famous historical artefacts from thousands of years of human history, is an ambitious spot to launch a games museum. The 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 expressing culture,” he says. “A video game is exactly the same as a novel or a theatrical piece, just a different form of art, with that extra element of gameplay.”

Twelve years and two million visitors later, it’s taken on new investment, a new name and a new location in the centre of the UNESCO world heritage site. Touring it a few days before the November 30th opening date, the main floor most closely resembles a traditional museum exhibit.

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

It’s a modestly-sized combination of exhibition and play space that’s trying to be more cultural centre than series of static exhibits, reflecting lessons learned from the prior incarnation. “VIGAMUS was kind of a super long beta test of 12 years to make this,” says Rickards, sitting on a small stage at the back of a quintessentially Roman venue: formerly some ageing retail 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 – they expect that in a game museum, they should be able to play a lot. I think it’s very important because you cannot experience games without playing. Interactivity is the only thing that many would say differentiates games from all the other media.”

GAMM has thus added the theatrically-titled Path of Arcadia and Historical Playground spaces: a collection of arcade machines and games consoles, respectively, in part intended to satisfy what the team hopes will be a larger audience supplied by their new position in the heart of the tourist-choked centre of the city. But it’s the main area, GAMMDome, which offers what they see as GAMM’s key feature: rather than printed text signage, the area is flanked with pairs of digital screens, the lower displaying historical information and the upper a series of talks by game creators.

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

“We wanted to have a space that keeps up with the industry, and also was able to show the people behind the games,” says General Manager Eva Sturlese. “From an authorial point of view, but also an artistic one, a narrative one, and so on. The concept is that there’s space for everybody to appear, but also to contribute to the awareness behind video games as a cultural media, which of course is one of our missions in general.”

“We wanted to have a space that keeps up with the industry, and also was able to show the people behind the games. From an authorial point of view, but also an artistic one, a narrative one, and so on.”

“Games change,” adds Rickards. “We can’t have a museum that, after a year, is not really up-to-date enough to tell the story of games. We like the fact that we can continue working on this project, it’s ever-changing.” Creating content for the system is extremely labour-intensive for the museum’s curators, but they’re enthusiastic about its potential.

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

In the meantime the exhibits currently dedicated to local development are surprisingly few, although the museum has been part-funded by Milestone, the venerable Italian racing game studio now owned by Embracer Group, and they’ve been rewarded with a dedicated section in the basement play space which includes artefacts from the development of its 1995 debut Screamer. Embracer CEO Luisa Bixio is an enthusiastic supporter of the museum, and like Ricards is bullish on the Italian development scene – Davide Soliari’s post-Rabbids studio is a source of particular excitement.

The team aims to “stress the value of what we do in our country” says Rickards, and GAMM has been designed to work as a venue for this too. The stage at the rear sits in an area where display cases will be fitted with castors, enabling 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 industry and community to host events, with the latter in particular increasingly short of shared space as both arcades and physical retail have died off.

The current lineup does a fine job showing the history of the medium. The arcade machines have been curated to highlight the “golden age” from 1978 to 1984, with newer releases included to demonstrate the evolution since.

The lower-level play area is curated to show the span 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 in the main level, for fear they wouldn’t survive being left in the hands of the public.

“The hope is that GAMM will serve as a place for both industry and community to host events, with the latter in particular increasingly short of shared space as both arcades and physical retail have died off.”

It’s an understandable caution, albeit one that undercuts the historical value of the exhibit. Curators plan to use guided tours and the display screens to fill the gap, enabling them to showcase things like the Dreamcast VMU or the experience of loading C64 games from cassette tapes without risking the museum’s collection.

The focus is on storytelling rather than preservation, a hot-button topic that Rickards prefers to leave to other members of the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects (EFGAMP) which includes Berlin’s ComputerSpiele museum and the UK’s National Videogame Museum. “Some European entities are much stronger, devoted to specific game preservation, and we like the idea of working together with them,” he says.

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

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

Compared to this year’s other big museum launch, Kyoto’s Nintendo Museum, GAMM is the plucky indie rather than the AAA console release. It lacks the scale and presentation that Nintendo offers, but it’s built with heart and passion, shows a wider range of gaming history and the faces of the people who built it.

It’s also, to return to Rickards’s game dev analogy, something like an Early Access release: up and running but with much grander features in the pipeline, which he himself acknowledges. “We’ll definitely have a day one patch,”  he laughs. “We’ve already seen a lot of things we need to fix. We are ugly right now, but we can grow a lot, and get much better.”