We wanted to hear about how they run the unique museum.
Article by Jon Håvard Gundersen.
In the city of Tampere in Finland, there is a unique museum dedicated to the Finnish games and players. We thought this was so exciting that we reached out to Niklas Nylund, who works at the Finnish Museum of Games. At the museum he has really found the job of his dreams, where he can combine his passion for games and history.
Can you start by telling about idea of the museum? ?
The idea for a permanent Finnish Museum of Games came from Mikko Heinonen from the Pelikonepeijoonit game collector group in 2014. At the Rupriikki Media Museum, which is part of the Tampere Historical Museums, we had been collaborating with the Pelikonepeijoonit and other game history enthusiasts since the early 2000s, as well as research from the local Tampere University Game Research Lab.
Mikko realised that this partnership of collectors, museum professionals and academics could very well build and host a permanent museum dedicated to the history of Finnish games, and that it would also be in the interest of game enthusiasts and game companies to help the City of Tampere fund it.
Yes, how did you solve the initial funding?
Our crowdfunding campaign in 2015 was very successful. It was the first crowdfunding campaign in Finland that was led by a municipal actor (Tampere Historical Museums) and we managed to gather over €80.000 from over 1000 donors, which at the time was a national record for crowdfunding campaigns. This helped us to show the importance of, and demand for, a museum dedicated to Finnish game history, both in the national press but also in the city organization.
In building the exhibition, we decided to tell our story through 100 Finnish games, ranging from best-selling commercial titles like Angry Birds (2009), Max Payne (2001) and Clash of Clans (2012) to much more obscure and less known games. We also did not want to forget the bustling shareware indie game development scene in Finland in the 90s, which produced games like Slicks ‘n Slide (1993) and Propilkki (1999).
Ah, Slicks ‘n Slide, I remember that one! Hours of fun with local multiplayer, sounds perfect for the museum. Are there any more of these indie shareware titles at the museum?
Actually quite many! We have dozens of indie titles on display. Older PC classics in the vein of Slicks ‘n Slide include UnReal World (1992), which is still in development, as well as Liero (1998), Stair Dismount (2002), Damage (1996) and Triplane Turmoil (1996). There are also newer indie games on display, as well as a selection of even older games for home computers like the Commodore 64.
How did you decide which games to include?
It was relatively easy to decide on including 100 games since Finland was celebrating its 100th anniversary as a country when we opened in 2017, but deciding which games those would be was much more difficult. Our partnership of collectors, museum professionals and academics had many long and heated discussions on the relative importance of different games and game genres.
In the end we decided to include not just digital games, but also board games, card games, tabletop roleplaying games and larps. We also realized early on that we wanted to include various niche games and phenomena, and even some transgressive games like the bullying game Inva-Taxi (1994), just to show the breadth of game making and the motivations behind making games.
The end result engages with game making much more widely than game exhibitions usually do.
Are all of the 100 games playable at the museum? Do you use emulators or original hardware to play the older games?
We use both original hardware and newer machines running old software. We try to stay clear of emulators and prefer FPGA simulation, but in a few rare cases we have been forced to use emulation. In those cases we have tried to focus on the quality of the emulation, since that can fluctuate a lot on a case-by-case basis.
In the end, we were in contact with all the game developers behind the games we decided to put on display. This way, we were able to get interesting objects and hardware for the exhibition from them, either as donations or as loans. Some game companies and game makers even tailored dedicated kiosk versions of their games for use in the exhibition.
The exhibition is automated, so that it can be started or closed with just one button press. During the day, we don’t want visitors to have access to the computers outside of the games, so we have quite many solutions in place for that. Kiosk versions work without internet access with a dedicated and locked down user experience, which prevents user activities on the device outside of the software. For some older Windows games, we actually run them on dedicated Linux machines, and others are running kiosk versions provided by the game makers on modern machines.
Some games like Cities Skylines isn’t something you just play for a few minutes, or even a few hours, how does this work in this context??
We are aware that it can be complicated to really understand a longer game during a museum visit, and that there are no perfect solutions for this. We mostly display original games without any content changes, and some of the longer games and especially older games can be difficult to understand. We have provided written step-by-step guidelines for visitors, but the gameplay is in most cases original.
For Cities: Skylines (2015) we actually have a dedicated version made by the game company Colossal Order, which resets the game at set intervals. There are some other cases in the museum where we have done similar things, usually with the help of the original developers.
Are the any of the games on display that generates a large queue of visitors than others?
There are a few favourites! We have a game arcade with about 15 machines that continues to be very popular. Other popular games are Hugo (1993), which is not actually developed in Finland, but was run on Finnish national TV, and Nopeustesti (1990), a speed tester that is also well-known from the Speden Spelit TV show.
We have also produced very popular smaller and temporary exhibitions each year, dealing with e.g. Japanese romance games, Nokia’s failed game phone N-Gage and the 50th anniversary of tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons that we have put on this year.
We’ve actually done close to 30 changing exhibitions over the years. Favourites include the two My Game History (2017 and 2018) which are exhibitions that we’ve done together with students from Tampere University. Led by our longtime collaborators dr. Annakaisa Kultima and dr. Jaakko Stenros students delved into their own personal game histories, showing games, memories and pictures from their past.
Another highlights for me include The Cake is a Lie (2021) which dealt with the food culture of games, and Imaginary Geography (2022) which dealt with the relationship of maps, imagination and games, as well as Memory Limits (2022), which showcased artworks on original Game Boys. A list of temporary exhibitions can be found here.
It really sounds like this museum would have been something that I would have loved to visit as a pupil at school. Do you arrange any kinds of workshops at the museum?
Yes, we’ve done some in the past by collaborating with the Art Arc cultural education program here in Finland. Our latest series of workshops was about the Nokia N-Gage, where kids designed their own versions of a game phone and content for them.
Earlier workshops have also included some very basic game design work, but we haven’t found a reliable way to teach actual coding yet, but there are some plans about that as well.
Finland has a very impressive gaming industry and history. Do you have any personal theories of why that is?
By the 80s and 90s, we were technologically and culturally tied to the West, but our economy was still fairly independent and closed. This led to a situation in the 80s and 90s where people wanted to make games, but there were no publishers for them. The game culture of the time became fairly non-commercial, which led to a situation where people were making games out of a passion towards the medium.
I think this still shows in the dedication and ethics of many who work with games, although the Finnish game industry is nowadays more clearly a part of the global market.
Another aspect is the demoscene, which has been very strong in Finland, and many people from the scene ended up founding their own game companies like Remedy and Housemarque.
Nokia also invested heavily into domestic game companies in the early 2000s, and although Nokia’s game phone N-Gage was a huge failure, it helped the industry professionalize and showed Finnish game developers what doesn’t work in mobile gaming.
And of course Finnish weather is quite miserably for large parts of the year, so it makes sense to stay indoors and play games!
Do you have any impressions that the people of Finland have a different views of games than in Norway or other countries? Do you think that games are more accepted or embraced by the society?
I think the success of Finnish mobile games companies Rovio with Angry Birds and Supercell with Clash of Clans showed that the game industry is a viable industry, which also changed the public view of games. Supercell founders were also very supportive of paying their taxes to Finland in support of the welfare state, which helped people realize that it can also be a sustainable industry.
Lately careers in e-sports and streaming have become more known to the general public and there is increased interest in them. We also have very skilled and dedicated game educators in Finland, who have been able to refute many myths about gaming. I also think that the Finnish Museum of Games has been able to shift the publics view towards a more permissive view of games as a part of culture as a whole.
When working with all of these Finnish games, have you identified any special features or characteristics that is typically ‘Finnish’?
I guess Finnish games are known internationally for their weird subject matter and their high difficulty. The image of Finland and Finnishness as something weird is a thing that games like Control (2019), Alan Wake II (2023) and My Summer Car (2016) play around with consciously, and the relentless difficulty of games like Noita (2019) and Cruelty Squad (2021) has become almost a meme.
Then again the successful Finnish mobile game industry seems to be very good at making games that cater to an international and diverse audience of people who want quality and dedication in their mobile games.
Lastly, do you have any plans for future exhibitions, temporary or permanent?
There are lots of plans, but nothing I can talk about publicly at the moment!
All photos are licensed with CC BY 4.0 and are used without any changes from the Saarni Säilynoja / Vapriikki Photo Archives.