Video games have long gained legitimacy to the point of being on the verge of being museumified. Resting on “the largest collection of video games in Europe”the French Video Game Museum has just opened in the Paris suburbs of Arcueil in Val-de-Marne in a space of 1,200 m2. It displays 140 functional gaming stations accessible to the public. Thanks to donations and acquisitions since 2003, MO5 now boasts a total collection of more than 70,000 objects (consoles, arcade machines, video games among others). For Gilles Martin, president of MO5, and the team in charge, this collection must be visible and playable. The ambition is to make this place a fun space as much as a place of history. MO5 is the name of a fun microcomputer marketed in 1984 by the Thomson company.
The MO5 team was able to count on the Arcueil town hall which rents the building for a symbolic euro per year. The association counts on its 700 members, paid entries (less than 10 euros according to MO5), the shop and the refreshment bar to balance the accounts. MO5 aims to obtain the Musée de France label.
Another video game museum project is in the pipeline but is struggling to come to fruition: “Odyssey”. Videographer Benoît Theveny is leading this project which consists of opening a vast fun complex in Bussy-Saint-Georges (Seine-et-Marne) by 2026. A crowdfunding campaign has already raised 2.2 million euros in 2023 and received the “high patronage” of Emmanuel Macron.
The Arcueil Video Game Museum.
© Association MO5
Several similar projects have punctuated recent decades in France. This is particularly the case of the Video Game Museum opened in 2010 on the roof of the Grande Arche de la Défense. The museum closed less than two years later, due to lack of sufficient attendance and a viable economic model. In Bordeaux, the Replay Museum now exists in a traveling form in the absence of a fixed premises whose rent remains out of reach for a voluntary structure.
Elsewhere, video game museums have better luck. The first permanent museum dedicated to consoles (the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin) was opened in 1997 in Germany and is still in operation. Other structures followed: the United Kingdom opened a National Videogame Museum in Sheffield (formerly National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham, 2015), attracting some 40,000 visitors in 2024 to its new hall. In the United States, larger institutions devote significant collections to video games: the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (Oakland, California) holds more than 15,000 playable video game-related artifacts.
According to Newzoothe global video game market will represent $189 billion in 2025. The number of active players worldwide is estimated at around 3.6 billion. In France more precisely, 40 million people (or more than 7 out of 10 French people) play at least occasionally. The playful medium has become an essential heritage object for understanding the technological and social evolution of recent decades. Paradoxically, and despite the popularity, this heritage must be preserved. Donating your games to a museum guarantees their posterity – they will be stored in protected reserves, restored if necessary, and shown to the public.
Arcade terminals and playable video game consoles in the Arcueil Video Game Museum.
© Association MO5
