About your visit
Yes – you can book tickets here.
The NVM is an independent museum, run by our parent charity The BGI. We generate all of our own income through admission tickets and our other activities. Our charity currently receives no core arts funding so we rely on visitors, patrons and sponsors to deliver our unique services and content to our visitors.
Tickets can be purchased on the door. However, we highly recommend buying tickets in advance through our online ticket shop, as we cannot guarantee entry if we hit capacity.
Each ticket is valid for one visit only, on the date and time you selected when booking. If you’d like to return, you’ll need to book a new ticket. Please note, we do not offer annual passes at this time.
If you are visiting over the summer holidays, please find details here about our summer ticket offer.
Children under the age of 16 must be accompanied by an adult, over the age of 18, to visit our venue. Anyone aged 16 or over may attend the museum without an adult.
The NVM is a parent-supervised venue. Adults are responsible for ensuring the children in their group handle the exhibits appropriately.
We do not have a café and we recommend eating before or after your visit. There are a number of excellent eateries nearby. For a quick bite, Greggs is just across the street. Albie’s Coffee is an excellent coffee shop serving all day breakfast and bagels just a minute’s walk away.
If you’re looking to continue your play, the Builders Brew Lego Cafe is just a short 5 minutes walk and offers a wide range of Lego sets to build whilst you eat.
We do however, have soft drinks available for purchase at the front desk.
Are you travelling from outside of Sheffield? The closest hotel to the Museum is the Premier Inn, Sheffield City Centre, just across the street.
You can find a full guide to accommodation in Sheffield on the Visit Sheffield website.
About our Gallery
Our curatorial team identifies, curates and creates exhibits for the Museum, taking care to respond to public feedback and involving them as much as possible in the process of the museum’s development.
That team works closely with our BGI board of trustees and to the Museum Advisory Board.
We love hearing from our visitors about their favourite games and those they remember from childhood! However, there are a few reasons why we can’t exhibit every game.
Importantly, we have chosen to make our galleries family friendly, ensuring visitors of all ages can enjoy our Museum. On occasion we may exhibit games of a 15+ rating. When this happens as part of an exhibition, we will make the rating clear so families visiting with younger children are aware.
About the Museum
Yes. We’re a registered charity (1183530), and currently in the process of becoming an accredited museum. That means we hope to have our processes, collections policies, exhibits and operations accredited by Arts Council England.
The NVM is run by the BGI, a charity for games culture, which is raising new funding for games skills, culture, diversity and production in collaboration with other organisations.
From time-to-time, we will be doing call-outs on social media for specific items to be donated.
Items will be identified where there is a gap in our current Collection, or where items are needed to enable play to continue in our gallery. Find out more on our Collecting page.
Not currently, but we hope to tour some of our exhibitions in future.
Of course! We get a lot of requests from universities and we are always happy to help where we can. Please send us an email and include as much detail as you can so we can facilitate your request with our team.
Please email any requests to christian@thebgi.uk.
Getting Involved
Our current opportunities can be found on our Work With Us page.
We currently don’t offer work experience opportunities at this moment in time.
Whether you’re a private collector, videogame developer or heritage institution, there are ways that you can help us in our mission to preserve videogames.
We launched a network of videogame preservationists, called the Videogame Heritage Society. You can find out more info at: vhs.thenvm.org