In 2017, inside Nintendo's flagship store in New York, I realised that much of what sat behind the glass, I already owned at home.
There are moments when a simple visit to a store can change the whole course of your life. For me, that moment came in 2017, inside Nintendo's landmark store in New York. I didn't go there looking for anything in particular; I was just another visitor to the city, with some free time and an old love of video games that had never left me. But surrounded by cases of historic exhibits, retro consoles in carefully staged displays and objects that functioned almost as monuments to an entire industry, I realised something that genuinely surprised me: many of those "exhibits", I already had. At home, in boxes and on shelves, sat pieces of the very same history I was watching that day, placed with such care behind glass.
It was a strange feeling. I didn't feel pride in a collection I had built without meaning to over the years; I felt responsibility. If a store on another continent could treat these objects as part of our cultural heritage, why shouldn't something similar exist in Greece? From that day on, an idea started to take shape, an idea that years later would become Greece's first Video Games Museum.
The background behind the idea
My background in technology and video games runs through my whole career. I am the founder of a successful web development and digital marketing company, imonline, and that experience proved invaluable when the time came to turn a personal passion into an organised institution. Building a business in a digital environment teaches you something valuable: that a good idea is never enough on its own. It needs structure, it needs a plan, and it needs someone willing to move from "that would be nice" to "how exactly will this happen".
That was exactly the biggest challenge of the first years after New York: how a collection built out of love becomes something viable, meaningful and lasting, without losing along the way what made it special in the first place.
From idea to plan
The idea born in 2017 started to take concrete form in 2022, when the museum moved from the stage of a vision to that of an actual business plan. Five years passed between the moment the idea appeared and the moment it began to take real shape, and that wasn't delay; it was maturing. I needed time to see clearly what I wanted to build: not simply a space displaying old consoles, but an institution with seriousness, long-term planning and a real mission.
Behind that transition stood a full business strategy, a SWOT analysis and securing the necessary funding, processes that often stay invisible behind a project like this one, but without which nothing could have moved forward. We had to answer questions that have nothing to do with nostalgia: what is the viable operating model for such a space, how do you preserve a collection of electronic objects in the climate of Crete, which audience will actually make it to your door. It was work that shows in no display case, but without it no display case would exist at all.
Today the Video Games Museum operates as a non-profit organisation based in the centre of Heraklion, Crete, with 1 January 2025 as its official opening date. Choosing the non-profit form was not accidental: we wanted it clear from the start that our priority is preservation and education, not the commercial exploitation of a collection. Our mission goes well beyond simply preserving rare objects: our aim is to educate the public and actively involve it in the cultural and technological significance of video games.
The collection and the first exhibition
Our collection includes more than 300 consoles, thousands of physical games and a great many rare objects, pieces that for the most part started out as my personal collection long before I ever thought of sharing them with an audience. Every object carries its own small story: when I bought it, where it came from, how many hours I spent trying to bring it back to life. It is no exaggeration to say that I know many of them better than some of my own personal belongings.
Our first temporary exhibition, titled "Choose Your Weapon", presents the evolution of video game controllers, from the historic Magnavox Odyssey to Sony's contemporary DualSense Edge. I deliberately chose it as our first presentation, because the controller is perhaps the most personal point of contact between a player and a game; every console generation carries its own feel in the hands, and we wanted visitors to feel that evolution literally, not simply read about it on a label beside a case.
The journey from New York in 2017 to opening our doors in Heraklion was long, full of unforeseen difficulties and revisions of the plan, but I think it was worth every step. In the next articles of this series I will share why I believe video games need their own museums, what challenges their preservation hides, and how I imagine the future of this field.
