GAMM Game Museum review – not-so-ancient treasures in Rome

Steve Boxer

Published December 5, 2024 6:00pm

GAMM Game Museum — When in Rome… play some video games (Manuel Alexander Geraci)

A new video games museum, featuring both new and old titles, has opened in Rome and it might just be the best one in the world.

Video games have been around for over half a century now and in that time they’ve amassed a rich history. So, it’s natural that they should start spawning museums. But the newest video game museum in the world is to be found in a surprising location. Called GAMM, it is based in the heart of Rome, on the busy Piazza della Repubblica.

We have two prominent video game museums in the UK: Sheffield’s National Videogame Museum and the Power Up section of the Science Museum, which started as a series of pop-up displays but is now a permanent fixture. However, GAMM is even more impressive than either, which is strange because, unlike the UK, Italy is not known as a hotbed of video game development.

I was amongst the first people to visit GAMM, three days before it opened to the public on November 30. It is hugely impressive, packed with rare video game artefacts and telling a much deeper and more nuanced story about the origins and evolution of the games industry than any other games museum I’ve been to, offering a vast array of hands-on experiences and set in an impressive venue.

GAMM Director Marco Accordi Rickards explains that GAMM even has a history of its own: ‘We opened a game museum for the first time in Rome in 2012, under the name VIGAMUS. Then after 12 years, we decided to improve it and rebrand it, to make people understand it was something completely new and not just a museum changing location. So, GAMM is the evolution of VIGAMUS. With VIGAMUS, we had much more limited resources, so my original idea was closer to this one, but it was impossible to do.’

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Accordi Rickards and his team decided to split GAMM into three zones, but the key one, which takes up the majority of the venue’s space, is called the GAMMDome: ‘This is the part where we combine the physical with the digital to tell key stories about the games industry. We had the idea not to use traditional print panels, but two layers of screens.

‘On the lower one, you have the panels telling all the different stories and on the upper ones, we alternate interviews between relevant people from the games industry or specific interviews made by us for GAMM, and some video showing the games. So, for example, when we talk about the first console war between Atari and Mattel, we show video of some of the popular games on the old consoles.’

That dual-screen approach sounds simple, but it turns out to be pretty clever and will surely be copied by other video games museums. It packs an awful lot more information into a small space, when compared to conventional text displays, and is a lot more engaging.

‘This system allows us to follow games, continuously changing the face of GAMM,’ says Accordi Rickards. ‘If we wanted to focus, for example, on different games, our entire team would work on new content, and when we had new game videos, new interviews and new materials, we could rotate those between the old ones and the new ones.’

‘So, if you had already visited our museum, after some time you could come back and not only play different games but also learn different things and hear different interviews,’ he adds.

GAMM’s other two areas are called PARC: Path of Arcadia – which contains an impressive array of coin-op arcade machines which can be played for free – and, in the basement level, HIP: Historical Playground, which combines more displays of older consoles, handhelds, and classic games.

Accordi Rickards describes the ethos behind HIP: ‘This is important because it is dedicated to the original element of games compared to other media: the gameplay; the specific way in which game designers construct forms of interaction – it’s the games’ language, at the end of the day. You cannot understand games only by watching them or reading about them, you really need to play them. And to try the different methods that games designers use to attract people and to get the attention of gamers of different ages.’

PARC has a great mix of arcade machines, spanning the earliest, including Space Invaders and Donkey Kong, to some of the most recent. So there’s Karate Champ, R-Type, and Super Hang-On as well as newer titles like Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Unlimited.

There is more than enough at GAMM to keep even the most demanding of retro-curious gamers interested. There’s a Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercially available multi-game console, curiosities like the vector-based Vectrex and Nintendo’s megaflop the Virtual Boy, plus a Nintendo Power Glove.

There’s also displays based on key games industry stories such as the first proper console war, between Atari with its VCS and Mattel with its Intellivision, which are told well – Mattel’s original Director of Development, Don Daglow, was guest of honour at the public opening.

There are also several displays dedicated to video games’ own proper archaeological moment: the huge landfill that Atari dumped hundreds of E.T. game cartridges into in 1983, when the US games industry crashed, and which was excavated using proper archaeological processes in 2014.

So what are Accordi Rickards’ personal favourite exhibits? ‘My personal favourite parts, because they are most connected to what I loved when I first started playing games, are two. One is the part dedicated to Infocom, because I particularly love text adventures, especially the Infocom ones. But probably in my heart, the number one is the Intellivision. I loved that console.’

And what, for him, are the Holy Grail objects that GAMM doesn’t have, but he would love to display? I suggested Computer Space, the first ever arcade cabinet, designed by Atari’s Nolan Bushnell.

‘Yes: Computer Space would be a very beautiful item to display. But there is something else I would like to have, but currently we don’t have enough space. I would like to have a special physical exhibition of the old LaserDisc arcade games, like Dragon’s Lair. Because they are strange video games; they are not even real video games, if you think about it. But I think they are still very fascinating when you see someone playing them.’

GAMM is the sort of school-trip venue you could only dream of visiting, and Accordi Rickards says that GAMM works closely with Italy’s education sector: ‘We have a branch of the company which is the education and learning division, where we organise courses – online and physical ones – and we also work with universities. On the one hand, we organise courses to help people get into the industry and learn more about games’ history and culture. And on the other hand, we try to talk to schools in order to encourage them to visit the museum.

‘I think it’s very important that kids learn that when they play, they are also doing something that can give them a good feeling, and that they can get new skills and learn a lot of things. I always thought that games are very strong for education, but normal commercial games even more than specific games made for educational purposes, because those games sometimes are a bit boring, while with the really great games, you get stealth learning.’

GAMM has also benefited from Italian government support. Accordi Rickards reveals that the building in which the museum is housed, ‘Was owned by a public institute owned by the region of Lazio, which has a lot of buildings here in Rome. It hasn’t been used, I think, for the last 15 years.’ Sadly, it’s difficult to imagine Britain’s authorities getting behind something as ephemeral – and non-commercially-oriented – as a video games museum, despite our rich games heritage.

Currently, GAMM represents the state of the art in video games museums, so if you were looking for a reason to visit Rome – which one hardly needs many excuses to do – and you love games, it’s now fully open to the public. It may not be the be the most obvious museum to visit in Rome, but it’s set a new standard for video game preservation and education which the whole world will need to keep up with.