Italy is to get its first gaming museum, with a vast collection of artifacts tracing the dizzying development of videogames from their ancestors in the 1950s through to the latest arrivals on the market.
The collection of software and hardware will be housed in the Videogaming Archive opening on March 23 in Bologna's Cineteca film library.
The brainchild of gaming fan and archivist on the Cineteca's Charlie Chaplin project, Andrea Dresseno, the collection has already gathered together an impressive number of items.
Donations and purchases have produced 820 videogames and 15 different consoles so far.
The videogaming legends on show include the mythical Atari 2600 console from the 1970s, the first Nintendo machines from the early 1980s, classic Sega Mega Drives from the late 1980s and Sony devices, such as Playstation.
The museum will map out the development of videogames, starting with their tentative beginnings in 1958 with a game called Tennis For Two. This was followed by Spacewar!, written by two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1961.
However, it was only in the 1970s, with the arrival of arcade games such as Pong and Space Invaders, that the general public got involved. The instant popularity of these games led manufacturers to start copying them and by the early 1990s, home videogame consoles were widespread.
Although the Bologna collection will not be the world's first videogame museum, it is the first one to set the games in the context of other, related forms of communication, chiefly the cinema but also music, literature and comics.
Traditionally the preserve of male teenagers, videogames have seen an explosion in popularity in recent years, as first-generation home-gamers reach their 30s and 40s.
The boom has been fuelled by designers and manufacturers targeting a much wider audience, with games such as as Nintendo's Wii Fit or Brain Training.
The average age of videogame players is now 28 and is expected to continue to rise, as videogames become ever more popular.
Sales of videogames in Italy reported annual rises of 40% in 2007 and 44% last year, with a 51% increase predicted for 2009.
Releasing the figures, the Italian Association of Videogame Software Publishers (AESVI) noted that the games sector remained untouched by the current economic downturn, generating well over a billion euros in Italy last year.
