Sheffield’s National Video Game Museum is set to re-open this weekend, after a successful crowdfunding drive helped raise enough money to see it through its prolonged closure during the coronavirus pandemic.
The National Video Game Museum, which is run by charity BGI and describes itself as “the UK’s only museum dedicated to video game culture and education”, opened at its Sheffield location in 2018. It features curated collections of games and ephemera highlighting the medium’s history, workshops, and has even hosts events from noted industry contributors, such as legendary Nintendo engineer Masayuki Uemura.
The museum’s engaging blend of education and entertainment managed to attract 40,000 visitors in 2019, but unfortunately, its prolonged closure earlier this year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, put it in dire financial straits which risked closing its doors permanently. “We have no safety net of funding to ensure our new charity outlasts a prolonged shutdown,” it said at the time, “[and] we’ve been ruled out of most government and all arts emergency funds.”
