Tweet
It's not where you'd expect to find a place like this. Nottingham's more famous for Robin Hood and Su Pollard than video games, but that's been changing over the past ten years thanks largely to Gamecity, a festival started by Iain Simon. Gamecity is a unique celebration of video games that takes over the city, and has one guiding ethos: everybody should be able to play, see and discover games for themselves. The National Videogame Arcade sees this ethos embedded in bricks and mortar, a five storey shrine to all that's great and good about the medium. I travelled to Nottingham to take a look around, and spoke to Jonathan Smith, the venue's co-director. "One of the reasons we love games is because they're always giving us new things," he tells me. "As a creator you become very interested in novelty and exploring things people haven't done yet. A permanent building, a cathedral dedicated to video games was something nobody had done yet, at least not in the UK, and as I got talking with Iain over the past few years, it seemed an opportunity with a gravitational force that was irresistible."
This isn't like the arcades of your youth, for sure - there are less cigarette butts lying around, for one thing - although there's still plenty that's comfortingly familiar. In one corner, taking pride of place near the entrance, there's a stand up 4-player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet. Dibs on Donatello. It's all part of a unique space, very open and clean. "We didn't want this to be something niche tucked away," explains Smith. "We wanted a place you could explore, it had to have secrets and it had to be grand, in the romantic sense. You needed to get lost in it." The building itself was once a lace factory, where art and technology once collided in another fashion, and its large showrooms with smaller offices and narrow hallways invite you to explore them.
Read more…
More...