#2: Sep 21st 2014 at 9:23:54 AM
That's less than 2 hours from where I live!
I'll have to visit sometime.
#3: Sep 21st 2014 at 1:38:46 PM
Since they're apparently going to be the "official" curators of video game history, does that mean we may have to change our The History Of Video Games pages?
Please help out our The History Of Video Games page.
Total posts: 3
http://friscoblog.dallasnews.com/2014/09/board-oks-agreement-to-bring-videogame-history-museum-to-frisco.html/
The museum’s collection of tens of thousands games, consoles, artifacts and memorabilia on the gaming industry has been described as the most comprehensive in the world. Most of the collection is in storage around the country, with bits and pieces used in traveling exhibits and expos. The Frisco site would be the first-of-its-kind museum in the nation dedicated to the video game industry.
Plans are to open a National Videogame Museum 1.0 using nearly 10,400 square feet inside the Frisco Discovery Center by April. Museum founders would then kick off a capital campaign to raise funds for version 2.0, a much bigger facility in Frisco.
“We’re glad to finally have a home,” said Sean Kelly, one of the museum’s founders.
The city plans to spend up to $800,000 on building improvements and extra parking at the Frisco Discovery Center, where the video game museum would be housed. The CDC and the Frisco Convention and Visitors Bureau board have each agreed to donate $100,000 for startup costs that the Videogame History Museum would have to match.
Kelly said Thursday that the museum already has the $200,000 matching funds in hand. And once the museum opens, it can then start looking for corporate support from big names in the industry – Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft – about helping out with the bigger facility, he said.
Museum officials have been collecting artifacts for decades. They started the Classic Gaming Expo in 1999 in Las Vegas. This past weekend they easily filled up 7,000 square feet at the expo with some of the best and rarest items in their collection.
Plans for what will go on display in Frisco are still in the works. But Kelly and co-founder John Hardie, who were in Frisco for Thursday’s vote, say education will play a large part in what they do. There’s the mathematics behind video games as well as the science, the technology and the engineering.
Music is also a huge component as the beeps and bops of the earliest games have advanced to elaborate musical compositions today. They hope to hold workshops that would show the inner workings of videogames and teach people how to build their own version of Pong, the first commercially successful videogame from the 1970s.
Artwork is also a large part of gaming as it has advanced from the early hand drawings and paintings to full computer graphics.
Kelly said preserving games for the future is also an important goal for the museum. He cited the highly addictive game Flappy Bird, which was released in May 2013 as a mobile app and taken off the market in February 2014 by its creator. The original game “had a cultural impact, but the data is gone,” he said.
The Frisco museum will also have a 1980s style arcade with as many games as they can fit in the available space. The history of the industry as well as interactive exhibits will also play a large role, Hardie said.
Only a small portion of the collection will be on display at any one time because of limited space in the initial museum. But they plan to rotate the best of the collection through for viewing.
The Frisco CDC board will hold a public hearing at its October meeting on the finances being spent for the museum. The design agreement and the lease agreement must still be approved as well. Construction at the Frisco Discovery Center is set to start in January.