The History Colorado Center is decidedly more fun than a lot of other history museums. Its founders, in fact, don’t even want it thought of as a museum — more like a family fun center with tales about the state’s past.

The Center, which replaces the Colorado History Museum in downtown Denver, has rides, games, TVs, and more. As visitors walk in the doors, they’re greeted by a gigantic topographical map of the state, and on top are a pair of rolling video players that change stories depending on their location on the state map.

Visitors can pick out one or more of 29 short movies that the machines have, including one about the founding of the Air Force Academy in 1954. On a large wall next to the map plays a 27-minute-long video about the state’s past, and the founding of Colorado Springs is part of it.

“We don’t see our job as to teach history,” said Bill Convery, the Colorado State Historian. “We see ourselves as a gateway drug to an interest in history.”

There are four floors of historic stories to explore, which range from mining in Silverton on the first floor to ski jumping and Colorado’s Ku Klux Klan on the second.

In the mining section, visitors can play a touch screen game to try and put the correct amount of dynamite in a tunnel wall to blast through to the silver behind it. And in the ski section, which includes a feature on early ski jumping in Steamboat Springs, there’s a Wii-like game that simulates a jump.

Most completely wipe out when they land. Convery said he crashed his first five times on the jump.

The Center isn’t all fun and games. In its Klan section, there are relics of a powerfully bigoted state government in 1922, when the Klan took control of the state Legislature. The display holds a picture book, next to a small pamphlet titled “The Kloran.”

Another portion of the second floor is dedicated to the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, when soldiers attacked and killed dozens of Cheyenne Indians, many of them women and children.

The Center opens April 28, but not completely. It will be opened slowly, over the next two years. In June, the Center will open a feature on the Colorado Constitution, and on Memorial Day it is revealing a gigantic Lego replica of the state. Another portion of the Center will open next year, and a final section in 2014.

After that, said Convery, the Center will rotate out a couple displays every few years, in shifts, so that it will always be changing. By 2022, the entire Center will be different, he estimated.

Photo by The Denver Post