The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) could use help from the video game industry and gaming fans.
It’s a tough time to be asking that, but the museum has started a campaign to raise enough money to become self-sustaining.
The mission is to continue to inspire the next generation of video game creators through the museum, has raised $8,500, or 1%, of its goal so far. Donations of about $500,000 would really help the museum get to a real level of sustainability, said Mason Young, the executive director at the physical museum in Oakland, California.
Young said the target amount could make the MADE into a solid institution with an amazing space — as well as a foundation of capital that can help the MADE last for the long haul.
For those interested in sponsorship, you can email the MADE at info@themade.org.
“We’re really trying to move ourselves into this new era,” said Mason Young, executive director of MADE, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We can keep doing what we’re doing if we wanted to. But we’ve grown the board, and we’ve decided that it’s time to try to fundraise to move ourselves into this new era where we can stop relying on these super volunteers, one of which, is myself.”
He added, “Alex Handy, the founder, and all of us have put a ton of work into keeping this thing going. We want to move it into the educational space. There’s moments that happen during field trips and during classes here that are incredible. Why can’t we do it every day? And why can’t we do it in a way where we know where the money is coming from?”
So far, individuals have kept the MADE alive, but the plan is move to institutions and grants to enable it to preserve more history as it happens in gaming.
“When people come in, they get that blast of nostalgia. They get the sense that, wow, this is cool and they see why we want to preserve it. We just want to continue to make it more accessible and open so people can join us,” Young said.
A long history
Back in 2008, founder Alex Handy went to the Laney College flea market. He found chips that were called EEPROMs — 12 of them for Atari Games. There were unreleased games on them, including a game about the Cabbage Patch Kids. He thought they were cool artifacts but couldn’t find a place that would take them as exhibit materials.
“There was nowhere that focused on playable preservation,” Young said.
So Handy decided to make a museum that was dedicated to the nostalgia around classic games. The MADE was the world’s first all-playable video game museum when it opened in 2011. Originally, the museum was set to be housed in San Francisco. But it’s better off with a neighborhood focus on educational efforts now, Young said.
The first space for the museum was in a high rise building in Oakland where guests had to get buzzed in. GamePro magazine went under in 2011, but the team donated its entire playable library of review copies of games.
“That created the foundation for our playable library,” Young said.
But part of the museum space caved in and the museum had to relocate. So it moved to the Sawmill building on Broadway in Oakland.
Today, it’s the Bay Area’s only in-person video game museum (there’s also the all-digital library of the Video Game History Museum), and a beloved Oakland institution formed with equipment and furniture donated by locals and travelers.
The MADE has free classes for kids, field trips for local schools, and serious preservation efforts. The MADE has hosted over 78,000 visitors, admissions, and students from all over the world since we started tracking attendance in 2016.
The MADE has educated 2,783 counted students across technology, programming, and art classes over 15 years — all at zero cost to the students. It also released video content on YouTube that has garnered 200,000 views to date.
A tough time during pandemic
Over the years, the MADE grew in multiple locations.
In March 2020, during the pandemic, the MADE had to close its doors on a place on Broadway Street in Oakland and put its belongings into storage. That was around the time I took a carload of video game paraphernalia that I had accummulated over the years.
The museum bounced around a bit, but then it found its permanent location in Oakland and it reopened its doors in June 2022. It’s at 921 Washington Street in Oakland.
The MADE had some big moments over the years. It obtained the source code for Habitat, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game launched in 1985 by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar at LucasArts.
The game was built for the Quantum Link online service for the Commodore 64 computer. In 2016, MADE uploaded the source code to GitHub for open review, and Farmer and others (Stratus, Fujitsu, and America Online) revived it as an online game called NeoHabitat. You can play it with an original Commodore 64 with a wireless card or an emulator in a browser.
During my visit years ago, Handy showed me autographed copies of games by pioneers such as Chris Crawford, Marc Benioff (yes, the guy that became a multibillionaire from starting Salesforce), and the leaders of Atari like Nolan Bushnell and Allan Alcorn. I laughed when I saw a big box that housed the controller for Steel Battalion, the Xbox game that let you control a mech using a large controller with 44 input points and two joysticks. It was the size of a refrigerator.
The MADE set up tables at Clinton Park in Oakland, and they were discovered by the East Bay Local Asian Development Corp., a local nonprofit. The group had a space available that was a lot bigger and inivited the museum to take it.
The location is near a BART train station and a historical building. The museum is applying for grants and is looking far and wide for support. It hopes to ally with the local school distrcits.
The museum recently held its grand reopening. The space has a loft where there’s more storage and a place to teach classes. On Saturdays, there are classes and on Tuesdays the place becomes a coworking space.
And Handy gave the reins as executive director to Young. Young himself was in the tech industry before working for MADE. He has a game company on the side now, and he was a web development engineer in the past — and he learned those skills from the Neopets game.
The exhibit floor shows about 12% of what the museum really owns. There are around 45 playable exhibits, including a couple of arcade machines. Many of the items are under the stewardship of the museum, and so it isn’t inclined to sell off a bunch of the inventory, partly because much of the content goes down in value over time.
The campaign
To keep doing what it’s doing, the MADE must develop the stability to produce the financial systems and the codification of culture that will allow the MADE to stand for the next hundred years. It can no longer rely upon the willpower of a few immensely dedicated individuals orchestrating a sea of volunteers that move in and out of its proximity.
This past year has been the museum’s first foray into a future of stability for the MADE, and the team believes it can continue to build upon this. To do so, it is are focusing on the following: Educational categorization of programming, systemization through one product line, growth of full-time staff, and evangelization of its playable preservation education methodology. All of the MADE’s programming has an educational purpose. It is helping to organize field trip to increase its reach and efficiency. And it’s growing its staff.
Part of the goal is to just get back to donation levels of around 2019, before the pandemic. Dolby was a big sponsor in the past (at $10,000 a year), but it had to cut its donations more recently. Google also donated in-kind resources. But everything else has been individual contributors.
“Fundraising is hard, and especially grants are really hard right now,” Young said. “Corporate funding is nearly impossible. It’s getting sliced everywhere. But when you come in and see what the space is doing, we’re in a good situation to reach out and ask if people want to help us with the work we’re doing over the next three years. And do you want to see us exist for the next 100 years? This support we’re looking for.”
The museum’s only full-time employee is Young, and there are front-desk staff members who can work four to 12 hours a week. The board members are unpaid.
The MADE’s surveys show kids love the classes. One out of every two students will give up their Saturday mornings to attend two or more classes a year, and one out of three students will do this three or more times. The ethnic distribution of attendees are representative of the city of Oakland.
Part of the MADE’s purpose is to also provide a weekly co-working space for the game industry. The MADE said 700 indie game developers have used the space to connect with their peers, and this year, the MADE is on track to connect 500 game people. The museum has also had a lot of volunteers over the years.
The museum said almost all of the MADE’s revenues are used for operations. And the time has come to recruit more professional staff instead of relying on volunteers. The MADE has a museum space opening in the loft later this year that will have a lot of the GamePro magazines on display.
Young said the museum’s doors are wide open for volunteers, who often create exhibits. The docents and staff are curating everything to appeal to kids on field trips and other educational material targeted for kids ages eight to 13. On Saturday, the classes focus on animation, character design, level design, programming, sound, music and more.
“The capacity is completely up to our volunteers and our donors at this time, but we would love to try to save more of these projects, and we’d love to continue to try to fight for copyright to allow us to do,” Young said. “What can we do with playable preservation? People are realizing that if we don’t find a way to put this in a library or a museum that the public has access to, we’re just going to be paying subscription services to act a very small curated part of it.”
A vanishing history
Now that so many games have gone digital only, the industry is at a tipping point where it may stop caring about physical games, Young said. And so there is a kind of race to capture a lot of the history that could be on display in a physical museum.
The fundraiser will likely continue through the end of the year. The $500,000 goal is meant to give the MADE enough runway to develop a new long-term system that can keep it operating for years to come. The goal is to be able to get it to operate for 100 years.
“We need systems in order to be here for the long haul,” Young said.
If the effort succeeds, Young said, “We could transform the MADE to keep it open for as long as we want, and we’ll have the most impact on the community around us.”