Where Games Are Kept Alive: The National Videogame Museum

Most museums ask you to keep your hands off the exhibits. The National Videogame Museum in Sheffield asks the opposite. Its collection is meant to be switched on and played, more than a hundred games across the decades, from Space Invaders to Monument Valley, all there to be picked up rather than admired through glass. For a place devoted to a medium you experience by doing, that is exactly right, and it is a large part of why the NVM is one of the most important homes games have in Britain.

The UK's centre for videogames

The National Videogame Museum is the United Kingdom's cultural centre for games, housed in Castle House in Sheffield and run by the charity the BGI, whose mission is simply to transform lives with games. It began in 2006 as GameCity in Nottingham, grew into the National Videogame Arcade, and settled into its Sheffield home in 2018. Alongside a floor full of playable machines it runs education programmes, exhibitions such as Made in Sheffield and The Arcade, and a steady effort to preserve not just the games but the stories of the people who make and play them.

That last part matters. The NVM recently launched Behind the Screens, a nationwide survey to map Britain's videogame heritage, calling on developers, publishers and collectors to help decide what gets saved. It is the same instinct that drives any good archive: if you do not gather this history while the people and the objects are still here, much of it quietly disappears.

A kindred spirit

This is a Game Boy museum writing about a national one, and the two could hardly differ more in scale, but the impulse is identical. Whether it is a whole medium under one roof in Sheffield or a single grey handheld documented object by object here, the work is the same: to take something people once thought disposable and treat it as culture worth keeping. Institutions like the NVM make that case loudly and publicly, that games are heritage, and in doing so they make room for everyone else doing the quieter documentary work around the edges.

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The Game Boy has its own place in that story. It is one of the machines that turned games into something you carried everywhere, and a fixture of the childhoods many of the NVM's visitors come to relive. Seeing it, and its whole era, treated with real curatorial care by a national institution is a heartening thing.

Worth visiting, worth supporting

If you are ever in the north of England, the NVM is worth the trip: open Thursday to Sunday, more than a hundred games to play, and a mission that reaches well beyond the building into schools and communities. As a charity it runs on visits, donations and support. You can plan a visit, or back the work, at thenvm.org. A museum you play is a lovely idea. A museum that also fights to keep the whole medium's history alive is an important one.