The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (The MADE) will kick off a marathon telethon fundraising event on July 20 in order to raise funds to keep the doors open on this non-profit videogame museum in downtown Oakland.
The marathon fundraising event will begin on July 20 at 6 PM PT, with live comedy and stand-up featuring prominent Bay Area comedians who’ve written for Saturday Night Live, The Onion, and performed at the Punchline in San Francisco. The event will be held live at the MADE, and streamed over the Internet via Twitch.TV.
In-person attendees of the event will be able to bid in a silent auction on numerous game-related products donated by companies like Dolby, Valve and Kalypso Games. Bidding will take place over the course of the weekend, during which time the MADE will be open for its normal hours and classes.
“We’re not only hoping to raise funds with this telethon, we’re also hoping to raise the MADE’s visibility, so people in the Bay Area and beyond will come join the communities that call the MADE home,” said Alex Handy, founder and director of the MADE. “The MADE is currently home to free programming classes for kids, interactive fiction meetups, indie developer co-working days, game creation game jams, and weekly tournaments. We’re creating a meat-space community for gamers, and we want everyone to come check out our collection and events.”
The MADE is a 501c(3) non-profit video game museum dedicated to the preservation of videogames, and the presentation of games as art. The MADE raised its initial $20,000 on crowd-funding site Kickstarter.com, and has used those funds to pay for rent, Internet and insurance at its facilities in downtown Oakland.
Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections at Stanford University Libraries and founding member of The MADE’s board of directors, said that “Digital games without a doubt have become one of the central creative media available for entertainment, art and other forms of expression. So much so that contemporary cultural history is difficult to talk about without including digital games. As a result, not only will the history of this medium be lost if we do not preserve the history of digital games, but there is more at stake: we will be unable to provide a complete cultural history of our times.”
Donors interested in supporting the MADE can donate at
http://www.themade.org/node/84 via PayPal.
About The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE)
Founded in 2010, The MADE is an all volunteer organization created by Alex Handy, a video game journalist and technological archaeologist based in Oakland, California. In 2008 Mr. Handy unearthed an 25-year-old parcel of long lost Atari 2600 and Colecovision games at a flea market in that city, spurring his creation of the Museum. The MADE is an IRS recognized 501c(3) not-for-profit organization. It’s EIN number is 26-4570976 . The MADE is 100% volunteer operated.
The MADE
610 16th St.
Suite 230 (Second floor)
Oakland, CA 94612
Dial #0230 to be buzzed in
510-788-5702
