A Nation's Games, Kept in Tampere: The Finnish Museum of Games
Finland is, per head, one of the most game-obsessed countries on earth, and in Tampere it has built a museum to prove it. The Finnish Museum of Games opened in 2017 inside the Vapriikki museum centre, and it tells the story of how a small northern country became a giant of play, from the games people made on paper and dice to the ones that ended up in billions of pockets.
A museum the public willed into being
The museum has an origin story that suits its subject. It did not arrive by decree but through a successful crowdfunding campaign, the public effectively voting with their wallets that this history deserved a permanent home. That home turned out to be Vapriikki, the city museum centre in Tampere, where the games now sit alongside Finland's wider cultural record rather than off in a novelty corner.
Inside, it runs from the long prehistory of play up to the present, with plenty of machines switched on and waiting to be used. The emphasis, though, is on the Finnish story in particular: the people, studios and breakthroughs that turned a country of five million into a serious force in games.
The handheld thread
This is where a Game Boy archive feels a surprising kinship. One of Finland's defining contributions to play was handheld and mobile, most famously Snake, the game that came preinstalled on a generation of Nokia phones and introduced an enormous number of people to the idea of a game you always had in your pocket. That is the same instinct the Game Boy embodied a decade earlier: play you carry everywhere. The two stories, the grey brick from Japan and the mobile wave from Finland, are really chapters of the same idea.
The Game Boy @ Tampere Special Exhibition - Memory Limits Special Exhibition - Memory Limits
There is one project of theirs I cannot help but single out. The museum has staged a special exhibition called Memory Limits, devoted to art made for the Game Boy, which is about as close to this archive's heart as an exhibition can get. You can read about it here.
A kindred spirit in the north
This is a single-machine archive writing about a national museum, and the scales are very different. But the conviction is identical: that games are culture, that a country's or a console's game history is worth keeping properly, and that the best way to keep it is where people can see and play it. Whether it is a nation's output under one roof in Tampere or a single grey handheld documented object by object here, the work is the same.
If you find yourself in Finland, the museum is well worth a visit, and you can learn more about it at vapriikki.fi. It is one of the places gathered in our guide to the video game museums worth visiting. A country that took its own game history seriously enough to build it a museum is setting an example the rest of us can only admire.
Comments