Emmanuel Macron had alienated the world of video games after the riots last June, declaring that certain young people were experiencing “video games in the street which intoxicated them”. After an apologetic tweet in September – “I made the gamers jump” -, the President of the Republic continues his reconquest operation by supporting the project of the largest video game museum in the world.
At the initiative, we find the YouTuber Tev, whose real name is Benoît Theveny, living in Japan. Passionate about video games and Japanese culture, he has more than a million subscribers on YouTube. He launched “Odyssey” six weeks ago now, with the idea of opening a museum housing the largest collection of consoles in the world. This was brought together by a enthusiast in the field, Ludovic Charles, who by dint of accumulating pieces (nearly 2,200), encountered storage and preservation problems.
The place should make it possible to retrace the history of video games but also house a Japanese village “offering shops, restaurants and various activities linked to Japanese popular culture”, says the man who defines himself as a “youtuber-entrepreneur”.
“We will be there to make things easier for you”
For this project to see the light of day, Tev chose to launch an online crowdfunding project. This quickly became a great success, with more than 22,000 contributions on Sunday morning, a few hours before the call for donations closed. This Sunday afternoon, the KissKissBankBank page where the call for donations is hosted was even inaccessible, “due to the high attendance”.
The museum should normally see the light of day in 2026 in Bussy-Saint-Georges, in Seine-et-Marne, on a space of nearly 3,500 m². And to carry out this project, Benoit Thaveny therefore received unexpected reinforcement: that of Emmanuel Macron.
“I simply wanted to give you my support and my high patronage for your video game museum project, an active museum, a living city,” declared the Head of State in a video message broadcast on Tev’s Twitch channel, “Here Japan”. “You have raised a lot of money with your participatory project. It is remarkable. We will be there to make things easier for you, to support you, to see this project through to the end and you can count on my support,” added the president of the Republic.