The Finnish Museum of Games ( fi, Suomen pelimuseo) is a

museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

dedicated to the history of Finnish

game A game is a structured form of play (activity), play, usually undertaken for enjoyment, entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator s ...

s located in

Vapriikki Museum Centre The Vapriikki Museum Centre (Finnish: ''Museokeskus Vapriikki'') is a cluster of museums operating in the old factory premises of Tampella, in Tampere, Finland. The name ''Vapriikki'' derives from the Swedish word ''fabrik'', meaning factory. ...

Tampere Tampere ( , , ; sv, Tammerfors, ) is a city in the Pirkanmaa region, located in the western part of Finland. Tampere is the most populous inland city in the Nordic countries. It has a population of 244,029; the urban area has a population o ...

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

. The museum exhibition consists of 100 Finnish games, six thematic period rooms, a video game arcade and a changing exhibition space. Overall, the museum has around 85 playable digital games. The museum was created with the help of a

crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...

campaign arranged in 2015. The crowdfunding campaign raised €85,860 from 1,120 backers. Major backers included game companies

Supercell A supercell is a thunderstorm characterized by the presence of a mesocyclone: a deep, persistently rotating updraft. Due to this, these storms are sometimes referred to as rotating thunderstorms. Of the four classifications of thunderstorms (s ...

Housemarque Housemarque Oy is a Finnish video game developer based in Helsinki. The company was founded by Ilari Kuittinen and Harri Tikkanen in July 1995, through the merger of their previous video game companies, Bloodhouse and Terramarque, both of which ...

and

Colossal Order In classical architecture, a giant order, also known as colossal order, is an order whose columns or pilasters span two (or more) storeys. At the same time, smaller orders may feature in arcades or window and door framings within the storeys t ...

. In addition to digital games, the Finnish Museum of Games also collects and exhibits

board game Board games are tabletop games that typically use . These pieces are moved or placed on a pre-marked board (playing surface) and often include elements of table, card, role-playing, and miniatures games as well. Many board games feature a comp ...

card game A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). A small number of card ...

miniature games Miniature wargaming is a form of wargaming in which military units are represented by miniature physical models on a model battlefield. The use of physical models to represent military units is in contrast to other tabletop wargames that use ...

roleplaying games A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal ac ...

and larps. The museum opened in January 2017. By the end of June 2017, over 100,000 people had visited the museum. Changing exhibitions have dealt with personal play histories, the role-playing convention

Ropecon Ropecon () is a role-playing convention held annually in Finland. The convention is one of the largest non-commercial annual events of its kind, having reached a record of "over 5900" attendees in 2022. The current venue is the Messukeskus Helsi ...

, the development of the

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), educ ...

game '' P.O.L.L.E.N.'' and

pixel art Pixel art () is a form of digital art drawn with graphics software, graphical software where images are built using pixels as the only building block. It is widely associated with the low-resolution graphics from 8-bit and 16-bit era computers a ...

. The museum was awarded the Sensation of the Year award at the in April 2017. The Society for the History of Technology awarded the Finnish Museum of Games with the Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits in 2018.

References

External links

* {{Tampere Cityscape Video game museums 2017 establishments in Finland Museums established in 2017 Museums in Tampere