A collection became an institution. The institution built its own software.
museumOS did not start as a product. It started as the only way to keep a growing museum under control.
The Video Games Museum began as a private collection in Greece and grew into a heritage institution - with a public floor, an education programme, exhibitions and international collaboration.
Preserving the collection turned out to be the easy part. Managing it was not: thousands of objects across dozens of platforms and media, each with different fields worth recording, spread across a database, spreadsheets and a lot of memory. We looked for software. What existed was either priced for national institutions, complicated enough to need a consultant, or built on a data model that could not describe a cartridge, a magazine and a controller in the same breath. So we built our own - and then kept building, until the same system also ran the front desk, the rota, the maintenance list and the school visits.
That system is museumOS. We didn't build software for museums. We built a museum first.
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The Video Games Museum, Heraklion, Crete.
A European heritage institution
Preserving the history of video games as cultural heritage, not nostalgia.
A playable collection
Original hardware kept working, so visitors experience the medium as it was.
Education & camps
Programmes for schools, families and young people throughout the year.
International collaboration
Working with museums, networks and preservation initiatives across Europe.