Swedish Games Archive Features 50,000 Games and Consoles in Its Collection

A Swedish media company is building a physical archive of video games and consoles. It’s located at Embracer Games’ base in Karlstad, Sweden but could be displayed around the world.

Embracer (formerly Nordic Games Licensing and THQ Nordic) has previously bought up more than 100 games studios and licenses, most recently getting the rights to Tomb Raider and Deus Ex. It’s now started work to “Archive and save as much of the video games industry as possible.”

It’s appointed a dedicated team to manage the archive, which already has 50,000 items. It plans to build a database to catalog the items today, with future goals including helping games researchers and journalists and working with other museums.

Thought it doesn’t plan to make the entire collection open to the public, its long term goal is to have some of the collection on display at the archive as well as operating temporary “satellite exhibitions” in other facilities such as museums.

Embracer’s retro gaming advisor Thomas Sunhede (thomas.sunhede@embracer.com) is currently interested in buying “large complete unique collections (both hardware and software) of formats we are missing.” Eventually he’ll be publishing a want list of specific individual games as well.