Game museum

Game Tech &Arts Labs game museum provides opportunity for students to explore history of games. As the next professionals of game industry, they should know what kind of games have been played and made through the times.

Finding working old games in their original form is a difficult task. Situation could be compared to if literature or film students could only read or watch ten year old works and any older works would have only short referrals or some pictures available. This is the situation where game development students find themselves, old games only have short descriptions and screen capture images. You might only get to play them with emulator, which might not give the authentic feel what the game is like.

Game Tech& Arts Lab managed to start its collection from a certain private collectors collection of computers, games and magazines. Collections items are approx. from years 1982-1994 and they are mostly in fully usable condition. Collection has over 15 computers(inc. VIC-20, Commodore 64, Spectravideo, MSX, Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST). For those computers there is great amount of game modules, -disks and -cassettes. For example there is over 250 original games for Amiga, over 100 for Commodore 64 and over 60 for Atari ST. Original games have their original box, manual, posters, t-shirts etc. material sold with the game. Collections also includes old computer, game magazines(ex. MikroBitti volumes 1984-1991 from the very first) and loads of manuals.

Currently game museum concentrates on time period before PC-games(before 1994). Next expansion of the collection is planned to include old PC-games. Also old consoles are needed to improve the collection.

Because the game museum facilities are quite small, it is only open for interested students and hobbyists(example: gamedev club Load members). Game museum also aids different courses by providing material. Visitors are adviced to make an appointment beforehand.