Recently we visited the National VideoGame Museum in Frisco, Texas. My husband and I both were skeptical of our boys. We wouldn’t be surprised if our kids lasted 15 minutes if that. We figured they would be bored out of their mind and would be done touring the museum in and out in about 10 min.
Boy were we ever wrong!
When we walked up we got our wrist bands and with each ticket you get a certain number of allotted tokens to play in the arcade.
After we were inside my kids naturally gravitated to the biggest TV screen they could and started playing. They were mesmerized that was about 15 minutes of pure excitement right there. While the kids were there with the hubby I ventured off to Super Mario Bros wall and I loved looking at all the gaming systems from over the years. It was so neat looking at all the games and systems we played on.
My favorite of all time was playing Pac Man on atari. My dad had a huge screen while I was growing up with three lights projecting on the screen; blue, red and green. I will always remember that. My cousins sisters and brother would sit there and play Atari for hours. My favorite was Pac Man and boy did this just put a smile on my face.
Talk about Pixel dreams; the other highlight was going into the arcade. I am probably aging myself here but this so nostalgic. It even smelled like an arcade to me and brought back memories of when I would go to the mall with my friends. It was a pure joy watching my boys delight in this as well.
Sure its all fun and games. However you get a lot of history and fun facts as you walk around. We ended up having to bribe our children to leave. As they didn’t want to. We were there for an hour and you could easily spend a few here.
Their mission is simple;
Our mission is fairly straightforward and simple: To preserve the history of the videogame industry by archiving not only the physical artifacts, but also the information and stories behind its creation.
Videogames have been around in one form or another since the 1950s and many of the people who first decided to combine interactive entertainment with a graphical display such as a monitor or a TV set have passed-away. In some cases, the stories these people had to tell are lost forever or only live on in second or third-hand renditions. Rescuing the physical artifacts left behind can be difficult enough – making sense of passed-on stories can be next to impossible.
The goal of the
National VideoGame Museum is to document, FIRST HAND, as much information about the creation and evolution of the videogame industry as possible and preserve as many physical artifacts as possible for generations to come. The vast majority of the people who created the videogame industry had no idea how enormous it would become and therefore never really saw much importance in what they were doing. The founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, felt he was creating something huge and saw videogames as having the potential to become a “billion dollar business”. There are individual GAMES that make that much today.
Lastly, we will present the information and as many of the physical artifacts as possible to the public in an entertaining and informative way. Videogames are meant to be played and that is the underlying thought behind each and every exhibit in the museum. This means that we will do everything in our power to allow museum patrons the opportunity to actually PLAY as many games as possible during their visit to the National Videogame Museum.
The
National VideoGame Museum is located at;
8004 North Dallas Parkway
Frisco, TX 75034
(972) 668-8400
Hours of operation are;
Monday-Thursday 10am -5pm
Friday and Saturday 10am -8pm
Sunday 12pm-5pm
Ticket prices are as follows:
$12 (general admission)
$10 (ages 10 and under)
$10 (Senior Citizens, Educators and active Military. Must present valid ID at time of purchase.)
Ages 3 and under are free.
Tickets are available for purchase at the door and are subject to 8.25% sales tax.
