FRISCO, Texas — A community development board in a fast-growing northern Dallas suburb voted Thursday night to approve a $1 million plan to renovate a city museum into the nation’s first video game museum.
The Frisco Community Development Corp. board voted unanimously to approve a deal with the Videogame History Museum for building renovations and startup costs, The Dallas Morning News reported.
The Videogame History Museum is a nonprofit that collects games, consoles and memorabilia tied to the gaming industry, from Pac-Man to a working prototype of Pong. Most of the collection resides in storage around the country and is often displayed at traveling exhibits and expos. The museum has long sought a permanent location.
Under the deal with Frisco, the museum would be housed inside the city-owned Frisco Discovery Center and would be called the National Videogame Museum 1.0. It would be the testing ground for a larger and more permanent home planned in Frisco.
The National Videogame Museum would lease space inside the Frisco Discovery Center for $1 per year in the deal that’s been in the works for months.
About $800,000 from the city would renovate the space and expand the center’s parking lot. Two $100,000 grants, one from the Community Development Corp. and the other from Frisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, would go toward the museum’s startup costs.
The museum would in return bring about $2 million worth of its collection to the city and would contribute $200,000 in matching funds.
The agreement calls for the nonprofit to launch a capital campaign next year for version 2.0 of its museum that must be in Frisco.
Renovations at the Frisco Discovery Center would start in January if the proposal is approved, and museum officials are looking to open in April. They estimate 42,000 visitors in the first year.
Landing the museum is “a very, very powerful message about the strategic vision of the council and being deliberate about how we build out the city,” Mayor Maher Maso said.
“This didn’t happen overnight, and it’s not finished,” Maso said.
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