Vigamus – Video Game Museum

Vigamus, the Video Game Museum of Rome, no longer receives visitors at Via Sabotino 4, in Prati: since November 30, 2024 the museum is called GAMM - Game Museum and occupies number 35/36 on Via delle Terme di Diocleziano, between Piazza della Repubblica and Termini station. Same institution, same management, same collection grown since 2012, new address and doubled space. Anyone still looking for the museum in the Prati district makes a useless trip. The official website is gammuseum.com, the phone number is +39 06 55136582, the email is info@gammuseum.com. You can enter every day from 9.30 to 19.30, weekends and holidays included, with no weekly closing day. The full ticket costs €15. Over 65s, people with disabilities, groups of 10 participants or more and school groups pay €12. Children up to age five get in free. Every Tuesday the price drops to €10 for everyone. From Monday to Friday, groups of 4 people or more pay €10 each. The family coupon, to be requested in advance with the form on the official website, is worth €39 for two adults and one under 14, €51 with two, €63 with three. The guided tour leaves every half hour from 9.30 to 19.00 and must be booked at least 24 hours ahead. Metro: line A, Repubblica-Teatro dell'Opera stop, or Termini for lines A and B, with the railway station a few hundred meters away. Booking is not required for single admission.

If you want to fit the visit into a wider itinerary, you'll find the full picture on the page dedicated to the museums of Rome: the video game museum is one of the few addresses in the city where the 15-year-olds and the 50-year-olds walk in for the same reason.

What Vigamus - Video Game Museum is today

The name the museum was born with in 2012 is a transparent acronym: VIdeoGAme MUSeum. For 12 years it meant a precise address, Via Sabotino 4, a small building in Prati halfway between Lepanto and Piazza Mazzini, and a cultural project with no precedent in Italy: collecting, cataloging, exhibiting and letting people play video games the way you would with any other language of the twentieth century. On November 4, 2024 the management announced the move to a new location, and on November 30 of the same year it opened GAMM - Game Museum on Via delle Terme di Diocleziano.

The company that runs the museum is Kabuto, a business founded by professionals of the entertainment industry. Marco Accordi Rickards, who is the museum's director and had been working on the project since 2008, is among the cofounders together with Luisa Bixio and Raoul Carbone: the same names who had brought the opening of October 20, 2012 to completion. So it's not a different museum that took the place of the old one, it's the same museum that changed size. The visitor count accumulated at the Prati location, over 2 million people in 12 years, remains the capital on which the new location was built.

One opinion, and I'll say it plainly: the move was the right choice. Prati was a convenient neighborhood for Romans and far from the mental geography of someone who comes to Rome for three days. Via delle Terme di Diocleziano is four minutes on foot from Termini, that is, from the point where tens of millions of people pass every year. A museum that talks about a young medium needed to be where people get off the train, not where people go home.

The size and numbers of Vigamus - Video Game Museum today

The current location extends over about 700 square meters spread across two levels and three thematic areas. The trade press that followed the inauguration speaks of over 600 pieces on display, of over 120 screens among monitors, gaming stations, interactive totems and LED walls, and of 24 digital interactive stations along the main route. The official website, for its part, describes the ground floor as a route with 150 monitors run by an electronic control room, infographic panels and thousands of pieces among consoles and video games. The two tallies don't match piece by piece, and that's not a problem: what counts is the objects, not the round figures.

The museum is recognized by the Lazio Region and is a member of ICOM, the International Council of Museums. Its predecessor on Via Sabotino had been one of the founding members of EFGAMP, the European federation of video game archives, museums and preservation projects, born together with the German and French institutions that did the same job. If you think a video game museum is an arcade with a plaque, forget it: preserving the software and hardware of the Seventies and Eighties is a very serious technical problem, because magnetic media demagnetize, capacitors dry out and cathode ray tubes go dark for good.

Where Vigamus - Video Game Museum is and how to get there

Via delle Terme di Diocleziano is the street that runs along the southern side of the bath complex built by Diocletian between 298 and 306 AD, and it connects Piazza dei Cinquecento to Piazza della Repubblica. Number 35/36 is halfway along this stretch. It's not a convenient detail: whoever visits the museum finds themselves walking on top of and next to the largest bath complex Rome ever built, with the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, carved by Michelangelo out of the central hall, about 100 meters away.

By metro and by train

The most elegant stop is Repubblica-Teatro dell'Opera, on line A: you come out onto the Koch hemicycle and walk down along the side of the baths. The roomiest stop is Termini, the hub of lines A and B and of all regional and national railways: from Piazza dei Cinquecento exit the walk is a few hundred meters, flat, on a wide sidewalk. If you arrive from Fiumicino airport on the direct connection, you get off at Termini and don't need to take anything else.

By bus, taxi and car

Piazza dei Cinquecento is the terminus or a transit point for a large part of the urban surface lines, and Piazza della Repubblica is served by others. Lines change over time and it's best to check them the same day on the transport company's app. By taxi you ask for Piazza della Repubblica and cover the last 50 meters on foot. By car it's a terrible idea: you're inside the limited traffic zone of the historic center and street parking doesn't exist. If you really do arrive by car, leave it in a metro park-and-ride lot and finish the trip by metro.

On foot, from the center

From Santa Maria Maggiore it's a little under 10 minutes, from Via Nazionale five, from the Quirinale a quarter of an hour downhill. If you also have the Baths of Diocletian or Palazzo Massimo alle Terme on your program, you have everything in the same block, and this is the best reason to organize a whole day in this quadrant.

How much the Vigamus - Video Game Museum ticket costs

The official price list, at the time of writing, provides for €15 for the full ticket. It drops to €12 for over 65s, people with disabilities, groups of 10 participants or more and school groups, for whom the guided tour is included. The companion of the person with a disability enters free. Children from zero to five years old don't pay.

Promotions and agreements

Three mechanisms lower the price significantly and almost nobody knows about them. The first: every Tuesday the price is €10 for anyone, with no conditions. The second: from Monday to Friday a group of 4 people pays €10 each, and 4 people is a normal family or two couples of friends. The third: there's a two-for-one promotion designed for grandparents, which pairs an under 14 and an over 65 at a combined price of €15. The family coupon, instead, has to be requested beforehand by filling in a form on the official website and arrives by email: you show it at the cash desk and it's worth €39 for two adults with a child under 14, €51 with two children, €63 with three. Anyone who shows up at the counter without having requested it pays the full price.

The museum also lists a long list of agreements that entitle the holder and their companions to the price of €12 per person: among them are the Ministry of Defense, ARCI Roma, CartaEffe from Feltrinelli and IBS, the Lazio Youth Card, the Carta Nazionale Giovani, the national association of the local police, the Club Medici, ICOM, City Sightseeing, the Centro Turistico Giovanile and the Viviparchi and Mondoparchi circuits.

The MIC card and the Roma Pass at Vigamus - Video Game Museum

Here I have to be blunt, because it's the mistake I see made most often. The MIC card, the annual €5 card that opens the civic museums of Roma Capitale, is worth nothing at this museum: the video game museum is not a civic museum, doesn't belong to the Roma Capitale system and is not even a state museum. It's a private institution recognized by the Lazio Region. The MIC card works for the Capitoline Museums, for the Centrale Montemartini, for the Museo di Roma and for the other addresses of the city circuit, not for this one.

The Roma Pass, instead, appears among the agreements listed by the museum, in the 24 and 48 hour versions, and entitles you to the agreement price of €12. It's not free admission and it's not one of the entrances included in the card: it's a €3 discount. If you have the card, bring it along. If you don't, don't buy it for this.

The Vigamus - Video Game Museum tour, area by area

The visit is organized in three thematic areas laid out on two levels. The ground floor holds the historical and documentary part, the lower floor the playable and experimental one. The underlying criterion is the one the museum has practiced since 2012 and that sets it apart from a private collection put in a display case: every era told by the panels can also be played on the hardware of that era, or on a reliable reproduction of it.

The GAMMDome, the corridor of history

The first area is an immersive route that stretches over 60 meters and hosts 24 interactive stations. The walls are one continuous screen run by a single control room: the visitor walks inside a timeline that starts from the laboratory experiments of the Fifties and arrives at contemporary production. Along the way you meet the machines that defined each step: Atari's Pong, the Commodores, the Game Boy, the PlayStations, the Xboxes, the Sega Dreamcast, today's virtual reality headsets.

The documentary heart of the area is a digital archive built with direct contributions from pioneers and specialists of the industry: video interviews with creators of the caliber of John Romero, who authored Doom, of Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, the two Canadian doctors who founded BioWare, of Yuji Naka, the programmer who brought Sonic to life. It's material you won't find in an encyclopedia and that is worth the ticket on its own, provided you have the patience to stop and listen to it with the headphones instead of crossing the room in 4 minutes.

The display cases of Vigamus - Video Game Museum: consoles, cartridges, memorabilia

Inside the display cases the museum shows its collection of machines and media. There are the founding objects: the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64, the Game Boy, the Wii. There are the rarities, such as a copy of Conker's Bad Fur Day, a Golden Sun, an autographed Perfect Dark. And there are, more interesting still, the failures preserved with the same respect as the successes: Nintendo's Virtual Boy, a red stereoscopic machine that in 1995 tried to sell virtual reality to an audience that wasn't ready and that was pulled from the market in less than a year. A museum that shows only the winners tells half the story.

The historical collection gathered on Via Sabotino included pieces of documented and unrepeatable provenance, among them the master disks of Doom and the demo disks of Crytek: archive material that is worth, in terms of preservation, what a manuscript is worth to a library. If you care about a specific piece, ask at the desk before going in, because the layout of the display cases changes with the temporary exhibitions.

PARC, the arcade room of Vigamus - Video Game Museum

PARC stands for Path of Arcadia and recreates the experience of an arcade from 40 years ago. Over 20 original cabinets, working, switched on, included in the ticket price and free of tokens: Pac-Man from 1980, Donkey Kong from 1981, Space Invaders, and then the following generation, that of fighting games and rail shooters, with Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Metal Slug, Time Crisis.

It's worth explaining why this room is the most precious part and not the most playful. A cabinet is not a neutral container: the position of the monitor, the height of the control panel, the stiffness of the joystick, the distance between the two players, everything is designed for a standing body that has put in a coin and has something to lose. The arcade video game was born with an economic structure inside it: it had to get you killed in 3 minutes so you'd put in another token. Playing Donkey Kong on a cabinet is a historical experience. Playing it on an emulator, however faithful, is reading a translation.

HIP, the Historical Playground

The third area, on the lower level, is called Historical Playground and is the section dedicated to gameplay and game design. This is where the museum makes available a playable archive of over 2000 titles, from the Seventies to today, on dozens of stations with contemporary consoles. It's the space where you can spend half an hour on Super Mario Bros. and then half an hour on The Last of Us, that is, do the comparative exercise that no reading can replace. The lower floor also hosts a modular room for temporary exhibitions.

The virtual reality area

On the lower level there's the area dedicated to virtual reality, direct heir of a record the museum had earned in June 2016, when on Via Sabotino it had inaugurated the Oculus Room: the world's first permanent room dedicated to the Oculus Rift, set up with second-generation development headsets and technically supported by Asus. Today the headset is a mass-market object, back then it was a gamble. Whoever enters the current VR area should find the time to try it even if they're convinced they already know how it works: the difference between the home headset and a station calibrated by someone who does it for a living can be felt in the first 30 seconds.

The cinema room and the party rooms

The lower level also includes a cinema room where documentaries and films about video games run: it's the place to sit when your legs give out, and it's also the only corner of the museum that's dark and silent. On the upper floor two rooms are reserved for birthday parties run by the museum staff, with a package that includes 25 admissions between adults and children, private use of the room for the buffet and the cake, two team operators for activities, tournaments and quizzes. Bookings go through the address party@gammuseum.com or the museum's phone. There are also evening opening packages for private parties.

From the Magnavox Odyssey to Rockstar: the story Vigamus - Video Game Museum tells

The narrative backbone of the museum, from 2012 to today, is the same: a timeline that starts from the first commercially sold console and arrives at contemporary production. It's worth walking it with a few coordinates in hand, because the panels take for granted things that are not to be taken for granted.

Year zero and the Magnavox Odyssey

The Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972 from a design by Ralph Baer, is the first console for the home market. It had no microprocessor, no sound, it didn't keep score: it generated points of light that moved on the screen and left everything else to sheets of transparent plastic to stick on the television and to cardboard scorekeepers. It sounds like an anecdote, but it's the point where the video game stops being a university laboratory experiment and becomes a product. Everything that comes after descends from there.

Commodore, personal computers and Infocom text adventures

The section dedicated to Commodore tells of the phase when the computer enters Italian homes, and the museum insists on this passage because in Italy it was decisive: the Commodore 64 is the machine on which an entire generation learned that software could also be written, not just bought. Alongside, the museum gives space to the text adventures of Infocom, the games without graphics in which the player typed phrases and the program answered in prose. Zork and its siblings invented, in the Eighties, a model of interactive storytelling that critics rediscover in regular waves and that today, with automatic text generation, is topical again.

The golden age of arcades and the crash of 1983

Between 1978 and 1982 the arcade video game lives its golden age, and the museum tells it with the real cabinets. Then comes 1983, the year of the North American market crash: too many consoles, too many bad games, too much trust burned. In two years the industry's revenue in the United States turned to dust. It's the episode that the historical route tackles head-on, and it's also the backstory of the most spectacular story kept in this museum.

From the three-dimensional revolution to Rockstar

The final part of the timeline goes through the birth of the three-dimensional, the war between platforms in the Nineties, the arrival of PlayStation and Xbox, and leads out to contemporary production, with the works of Rockstar Games as an example of a medium that has stopped addressing kids. Whoever visits with a teenage son or daughter should prepare for a conversation: the leap from Space Invaders to Grand Theft Auto is, in terms of language, the one that separates a silent short film from a three-hour movie.

A curiosity about Vigamus - Video Game Museum

In 1982 Atari put into production a video game based on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Steven Spielberg film released that year. Development was entrusted to Howard Scott Warshaw, a programmer who had already made successful titles for the same company, and it ran on a race-against-the-clock schedule to reach the shelves by Christmas. The commercial result was a disaster of legendary proportions: millions of unsold copies, returns by the truckload, a warehouse full of cartridges nobody wanted. In 1983 Atari emptied its depots by burying the material in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. For 30 years the story stayed a forum legend: it was said that there were hundreds of thousands of cartridges in the desert, and nobody had ever proven it.

On April 26, 2014 an authorized excavation open to the public opened the landfill. James Heller, who in 1983 had coordinated the disposal operation on behalf of Atari, declared that the buried cartridges had been 728,000. The actual recovery returned about 1300 of them. The city of Alamogordo, having become owner of the finds, decided to distribute a part of them to museums and institutions around the world. The video game museum of Rome was among the very first to receive them, after presenting its credentials and its exhibition project: the exhibition is titled E.T. The Fall, Atari's Buried Treasures, and it is permanent.

The point is not the fetish. The point is that those corroded cartridges are, for the history of the medium, what a fragment of an amphora is for archaeology: the material proof of an economic event that was told by hearsay. I don't know many museums in the world that can put their own 1983 in a display case and let you play it too.

Something nobody tells you about Vigamus - Video Game Museum

That the full €15 ticket, at this museum, is paid only by someone who hasn't done their homework. The official price list contains three shortcuts that no guide mentions and that the staff at the cash desk have no obligation to suggest to you.

The first: on Tuesday admission costs €10 for everyone, with no age, card or group composition requirements. A third off just for choosing the right day of the week. The second: from Monday to Friday, a group of 4 people pays €10 each. Four people are a family with two grown kids, or two couples, or a small group of students: it's the easiest promotion to hit and the most ignored. The third: the two-for-one designed for grandparents, which lets in a child under 14 and an over 65 for €15 in total, that is, the price of a single full ticket.

Then there's the family coupon, which is the really little-known thing, because it requires a move in advance: you fill in a form on the official website, you receive the coupon by email, you show it at the cash desk. Two adults with an under 14 pay €39 instead of €45, with two kids €51 instead of €60, with three €63 instead of €75. The coupon has no expiration. Anyone who arrives at the ticket office without having requested it can't fix it on the spot, and that's 6, 9, 12 euros thrown away for a 30-second form.

One last practical piece of information that nobody highlights: the guided tour leaves every half hour from 9.30 to 19.00, but it must be booked at least 24 hours ahead. Whoever shows up that same morning hoping to join the next turn is, as a rule, left out.

The advice I give you for visiting Vigamus - Video Game Museum

The advice is just one and concerns the order of the visit: do the ground floor first, and do it slowly. When people get it wrong, it ends badly. A father walks in with two kids, the kids hear the cabinets switched on, run downstairs, plant themselves at Mortal Kombat and you don't see them for two hours. The historical part, the one you paid the ticket for and the only one you won't find elsewhere, gets crossed in 10 minutes at the end, when everyone is hungry. The museum works the other way around: first the archive, the interviews with the headphones, the display cases, the timeline. Then the cabinets, as a reward.

On timing: it opens at 9.30 every day and closes at 19.30. The two best windows are very early morning, when the GAMMDome is empty and you hear the interviews without noise around you, and the late afternoon of weekdays. Saturday afternoon is the worst window, because the stations are all taken and the wait at a cabinet can become boring for a small child. If you can choose, choose Tuesday: it costs €10 and it's never the peak day.

On duration: two hours is the bare minimum, two and a half hours the realistic horizon for an interested adult, three hours or more if there are kids who really play. If you want to spend the day well, book the guided tour the day before, have yourself accompanied through the historical route and then stay alone in the playable part: it's the combination that gives the best ratio between knowledge gained and fun.

One last thing, and take it as a firm opinion: don't come here on an empty stomach counting on an internal bar worthy of the name. You're four minutes from a quadrant full of places to eat seriously. Eat first, come in after.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

That this museum was not born as a tourist attraction, but as an academic and associative project, and that this origin explains the cut of the route still today. The first official presentation took place in 2010, during the Italian video game developers conference. The opening to the public came on October 20, 2012, after four years of preparatory work. Behind it were AIOMI, the movement for video game culture, the patronage of the city of Rome and a teaching collaboration with the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

The activities the museum built in the following years move along the same line. In 2014 the VIGAMUS Academy was born, the higher education branch dedicated to design and development, with a specific virtual reality track created in collaboration with Crytek, the German company behind the CryEngine engine. In November 2016 the museum launches GAMEROME, an annual international conference dedicated to the industry. From the same organization also comes VMag, a trade magazine. And since 2013 the museum has been a founding member of EFGAMP, the federation that brings together European video game archives and museums.

Why does it matter? Because a museum born inside an ecosystem of research, training and preservation puts different things on display than an entertainment entrepreneur would. The interviews with the designers, the master disks, the panels on the 1983 crisis, the choice to exhibit industrial failures: these are a museum curator's decisions, not an arcade manager's. And it's the reason why it's worth bringing a kid who already chews through plenty of video games: he comes out knowing something he didn't know.

The right photo to take at Vigamus - Video Game Museum

The right photo is in the GAMMDome, and it has to be built with a bit of thought. The corridor stretches over 60 meters with the walls turned into a single continuous screen: if you stand in the middle of the passage, crouch down to chest height and frame it lengthwise, you get a perspective that vanishes into the back and in which the light of the screens draws two vanishing lines. It's the only shot in the museum that conveys the scale of the installation. With a person seen from behind halfway down the corridor you also have a yardstick, and the photograph stops looking like a rendering.

Technical rule, and it's not a detail: no flash. In an environment built on monitors and LED walls, the flash produces white reflections and erases exactly what you wanted to photograph. Raise the sensitivity, rest the phone or the camera on a handrail or a display case to stabilize, and accept long exposures. If your phone has night mode, this is the place to use it.

The second photo, the one kids like, is in the arcade room: the cabinets in a row with the monitors on and the illuminated signs above, shot from a low and slightly lateral angle, convey the Eighties arcade effect much better than a frontal shot. The third is the monumental-size statues of historic characters that guard the route, from BioShock's Big Daddy to Solid Snake: here the vertical framing with the figure backlit always works.

A warning few follow: ask the staff before photographing the display cases and the loaned pieces. Collections with archive material have different rules depending on who granted the piece, and a question at the desk costs 10 seconds.

Some important events that happened here in history

The first event is the founding itself. On October 20, 2012 the first Italian permanent museum dedicated to the video game opened at Via Sabotino 4: not a temporary exhibition, not a festival, a museum with opening hours, ticket office, catalog and preservation. In a country where the video game was still described on the evening news as an adolescent vice, the date has a weight that today is hard to measure.

The second is 2014, the year the cartridges recovered from the Alamogordo landfill arrive in Rome. The museum becomes the first institution in the world to exhibit them in a dedicated installation, the permanent exhibition E.T. The Fall. In the same year the VIGAMUS Academy gets under way.

The third is June 2016, with the opening of the Oculus Room: the world's first permanent room dedicated to the Oculus Rift, at a time when consumer virtual reality did not yet exist on the mass market. November of the same year brings the first edition of GAMEROME, which turns the museum into a meeting point for the European industry.

The fourth event is November 4, 2024, with the announcement of the move to GAMM - Game Museum, followed by the opening of Via delle Terme di Diocleziano location on November 30. 12 years of activity and over 2 million visitors move into a space twice the size, four minutes from Termini station.

There is, however, a fifth event, and it concerns the place before the institution. The museum today occupies a building facing the street that runs along the Baths of Diocletian, the colossal bath complex built between 298 and 306 AD, the largest Rome ever had. Inside that central hall Michelangelo, in his eighties, carved out in 1561 the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri. In 1889 the same complex became the first home of the Museo Nazionale Romano. 100 meters from the place where you play Pac-Man today on a 1980 cabinet there is a building where the Romans bathed 17 centuries ago and a hall in which the meridian line of Francesco Bianchini, traced in 1702, still measured noon for the city. No urban coincidence tells better what it means to make a museum of the contemporary in Rome.

Who has passed through Vigamus - Video Game Museum

The most impressive number is the anonymous one: over 2 million visitors between 2012 and 2024, at the Prati location alone. For a single-theme, private museum dedicated to a medium that when it opened was not yet considered culture by a good part of the Italian press, it's a figure with no easy comparison.

Then there are the names. Marco Accordi Rickards, journalist and scholar, who has worked on the project since 2008 and has been its director from the founding to today. Raoul Carbone, who in 2012 oversaw the opening as administrator and is among the founders of the company that runs the current location. Luisa Bixio, cofounder of the same organization. They are the three people who kept the only Italian video game museum on its feet for 12 years and who then moved it instead of letting it die.

In the museum's archive, with their own voice and face, some of the most influential designers of the medium pass through. John Romero, coauthor of Doom and Quake, the man who invented the way you shoot in first person on a screen. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, the two Canadian doctors who founded BioWare in 1995 and who rewrote the rules of storytelling in the role-playing game. Yuji Naka, the Japanese programmer who in 1991 made Sonic run at a speed the Mega Drive was not supposed to be able to handle. Their testimonies are collected in the exclusive interviews that run along the historical route.

Finally there's an indirect passage worth the three before it: that of Howard Scott Warshaw, the programmer to whom Atari entrusted in 1982 the video game conversion of Steven Spielberg's film. Warshaw has never come to Rome as far as is known, but his work rests here in a display case, in a cartridge dug up from a New Mexico landfill after 30 years. In the history of art it often happens that an artist arrives in a museum long after his work. In the history of the video game it happened for the first time, and in Rome.

Vigamus - Video Game Museum with children and teenagers

It's one of the very rare Roman museums where parent and child have exactly the same starting point. The father who spent the afternoons of the Eighties on a Commodore and the daughter who plays on a PlayStation 5 find themselves before two extremes of the same story, and someone else explains the story to them. The best role-playing game you can play here is the reversed challenge: the kids tackle Space Invaders, where there are no checkpoints or tutorials, and the parents tackle a contemporary title, where you need 12 controls and a map. Whoever loses buys the ice cream.

The age brackets work like this, from direct experience. Under five admission is free but the route pays off little: the panels can't be read, the cabinets are too tall and the controls too hard for a small hand. From six to nine the arcade room is perfect, because the games of that era have rules you can understand in three seconds. From 10 up the museum gives the most, because the historical part starts to work too. For teenagers who play daily, the game design section is the part that throws them off, because it takes apart the mechanism they use without seeing it.

If you're looking for kid-sized alternatives within the same city radius, you'll find Explora, the children's museum of Rome, the mathematics museum and the physics museum, all built on the principle of "touch" instead of "don't touch". For an outing of a completely different kind there's the Bioparco, inside Villa Borghese.

Accessibility at Vigamus - Video Game Museum

The museum declares itself accessible to people with disabilities and the passage between the two levels is served by a stairlift. The rate for the person with a disability is €12 and the companion enters free. If you have specific needs, for example a wheelchair of non-standard size or the need for a route without intense light stimuli, make a phone call to +39 06 55136582 before leaving: the GAMMDome is an environment built on screens and moving light, and for some sensitivities it's not a matter of indifference.

On the hearing side, the documentary part is enjoyed with headphones and this helps anyone who needs to turn up the volume. On the cognitive side, the route is linear and does not require forced choices: you can interrupt it at any point and resume it later, and there's more than one room with seating.

When to go to Vigamus - Video Game Museum and how long the visit lasts

The museum is open seven days a week from 9.30 to 19.30, holidays included. It has no weekly closing day, which makes it a precious resource on Roman Mondays, when half of the city's collections have their shutters down. The museum also organizes evening openings dedicated to events and private parties: if you're interested in a slot after 19.30, check the calendar on the official website or call.

The best period, for those who can choose, is the cold season: from November to March the museum is a perfect refuge for a rainy afternoon, and it's exactly the kind of visit that saves a Roman day that went wrong. In summer it works for the opposite reason, that is, as an air-conditioned place to spend the two hours when going out on the street in Rome is a punishment. If I had to name the optimal day and time I'd say Tuesday morning at 9.30: reduced rate for everyone, empty rooms, free cabinets.

Duration: two hours for an orderly visit, two and a half with the guide, three or more if the group includes kids who really play. Nobody throws you out: the ticket has no time limit.

What to see around Vigamus - Video Game Museum

Within a 10-minute walk there is one of the densest museum concentrations in Europe, and almost nobody takes advantage of it. The Baths of Diocletian are literally across the street, with the Michelangelo cloisters and the epigraphic section. The Octagonal Hall, the large domed space at the corner with Via Parigi, is one of the most impressive ancient spaces in the city and can be visited in half an hour. Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, not far away, holds the frescoes of the Villa of Livia and the Boxer at Rest, and in our judgment it's the most beautiful archaeological museum in Rome. With the same integrated ticket you can also reach Palazzo Altemps and the Crypta Balbi, which complete the Museo Nazionale Romano.

Whoever wants to stay with the contemporary should find time for the MAXXI, reachable in half an hour by public transport. For eating and shopping well, the Nuovo Mercato Esquilino is 10 minutes behind Termini and is the most international market in the city. Whoever goes to the museum out of passion and not curiosity should mark in the calendar Romics, the Roman comics and animation fair, which gives ample space to the video game. For an afternoon of a completely different register, the Leonardo da Vinci Experience plays the same interactivity card on another century.

Quick questions about Vigamus - Video Game Museum

Is Vigamus - Video Game Museum still open?

Yes, but under another name and at another address. Since November 30, 2024 the museum is called GAMM - Game Museum and is located at Via delle Terme di Diocleziano 35/36, between Piazza della Repubblica and Termini. Via Sabotino 4 location, in Prati, no longer welcomes visitors.

Why did Vigamus change its name?

Because the move to a bigger and more central location was accompanied by a repositioning of the project, announced on November 4, 2024. The management and the founders are the same ones who opened the museum in 2012.

How much does the Vigamus - Video Game Museum ticket cost?

Full price €15. Reduced €12 for over 65s, people with disabilities, groups of 10 or more and schools. Free up to age five. On Tuesday it costs €10 for everyone, and from Monday to Friday groups of 4 people or more pay €10 each.

What are the opening hours of Vigamus - Video Game Museum?

Every day from 9.30 to 19.30, weekends and holidays included, with no weekly closing day. Evening openings are tied to events and private parties.

Do I need to book to get in?

For ordinary admission, no. For the guided tour, yes, at least 24 hours ahead: the tours leave every half hour from 9.30 to 19.00.

How long does the visit to Vigamus - Video Game Museum last?

Two hours for a complete and orderly visit, two and a half hours with the guide, three or more if there are kids who stop to play. There are no limits on how long you can stay.

Is the MIC card valid for Vigamus - Video Game Museum?

No. The MIC card opens only the civic museums of Roma Capitale, and this is a private museum recognized by the Lazio Region. It's not a state museum either, so it doesn't fall under the ministry's free Sundays.

Does the Roma Pass entitle you to free admission?

No. The 24 and 48 hour Roma Pass appears among the museum's agreements and entitles you to the €12 rate instead of €15. It's a discount, not an included entrance.

Can you really play, or do you only look?

You play. Over 20 original arcade cabinets are switched on and free of tokens, included in the ticket price, and in the Historical Playground area there are dozens of stations with an archive of over 2000 titles.

Is there virtual reality?

Yes, on the lower level there's an area dedicated to virtual reality. It's the heir of the Oculus Room opened in June 2016 in the old location, which was the world's first permanent room dedicated to the Oculus Rift.

Are the E.T. cartridges dug up in the desert really there?

Yes. The museum was among the first institutions in the world to receive them from the city of Alamogordo after the excavation of April 26, 2014, and it displays them in the permanent exhibition E.T. The Fall, Atari's Buried Treasures.

Is Vigamus - Video Game Museum suitable for small children?

Under five admission is free but the route pays off little: the cabinet controls are hard and the panels can't be read. From age six up the arcade room works very well, from 10 up the whole museum works.

Can you take photos and videos?

Photographs are normally allowed. Flash is discouraged because it ruins shots of screens and LED walls, and for display cases with archive material it's best to ask at the desk.

Is it wheelchair accessible?

The museum declares itself accessible to people with disabilities and the link between the two levels is served by a stairlift. For particular needs it's best to call +39 06 55136582 beforehand.

Are birthday parties organized?

Yes. The GAMM Party package includes 25 admissions between adults and children, a private room for buffet and cake, two museum operators for activities, tournaments and quizzes. Bookings go through party@gammuseum.com.

Are there rates for schools?

Yes, €12 per student with a guided tour included. Bookings are made by email or on the museum's phone, stating the number of participants and the class.

How do I get to Vigamus - Video Game Museum by metro?

Line A, Repubblica-Teatro dell'Opera stop, or Termini for lines A and B. From Termini station it's a few hundred meters on the flat.

Is there parking nearby?

Not in the sense you'd like. We're inside the limited traffic zone of the historic center and street spots are a theoretical hypothesis. It's best to leave the car in a metro park-and-ride lot and arrive on line A.

What's the difference between this museum and an arcade?

That here the cabinets are documented, contextualized and preserved, and that alongside them there's a video archive with interviews with the designers, display cases with historic pieces and a chronological route on the language of the medium. The arcade sells time, the museum explains it.

Is it worth it for an adult who doesn't play video games?

Yes, and perhaps more than for a regular player. The historical part tells a piece of the industrial and cultural history of the twentieth century that almost nobody knows, and it does so with real objects. Then you try a 1980 cabinet and understand in a minute why that medium changed the world.

Can you buy the ticket online?

The museum lists the purchase and booking methods on its official website. For ordinary admission the on-site ticket office is enough, except on days of heavy crowds.

Is there a bookshop?

Yes, the museum has an area dedicated to souvenirs and themed objects.

One last thing. The video game museum of Rome is the only place in the city where you can get hands-on with a rule that holds for every young art form: nobody takes it seriously until someone puts it in a display case with a date underneath. In 2012, when this museum opened in a small building in Prati, in Italy the video game was still a kids' thing. Today it's four minutes from Termini station, recognized by the Lazio Region and affiliated with the International Council of Museums, with 2 million visitors behind it. Go on a Tuesday morning, spend €10 and stop in front of the corroded E.T. cartridge: you're looking at the only archaeological find in the world that was produced, buried and unearthed within a single human lifetime.

BUY the online ticket for Vigamus, the Video Game Museum, HERE

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

Planning a trip to Rome? The English guides to visiting the city are on ItalyPlanner.com.