Welcome to the Broken Games Collective newsletter! Here, you’ll find updates on the Collective’s ongoing efforts to restore access to games.

In this second issue, we recap some of our activities this year, including The Beautiful Game exhibit at Toronto Games Week and the game preservation tables at Toronto Game Expo.

You can join the Broken Game Collective’s Discord server! Just follow this link (and don’t forget to introduce yourself): https://discord.gg/KPnXxknt4H

Toronto Game Expo

This past Spring we joined with the Toronto Game Expo and the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) Library to showcase some legacy games and provide a space for attendees to learn some preservation techniques. Our booth ran over the two days of the Expo from the 28th to 29th of March with over 1,200 attendees engaging with the activations.

The activations included:

• Barbie Fashion Designer on the Barbie Computer and Printer where attendees got to design, print, and make their own Barbie outfits from the Personal Computer Museum Collection,

• variant copies of Rayman 2 for attendees to play and compare the playable differences from the Syd Bolton Collection,

• digitized episodes of the Electric Playground from 2001 (25 years ago!) from the EP Media Ltd. fonds, and

• how to clean your game cartridges with a hands-on station and complimentary zine guide to take home.

We also had a “What Should We Save” game preservation board for attendees to post their thoughts, ideas, and favourite items. We had a range of responses to save game characters, titles, consoles, and increasingly obsolete technologies like disc drives and headphone jacks. We had some prescient notes on saving game ownership from licensing and patents. While there were a few tongue-in-cheek comments, all in all we found that continued access to and preservation of the virtual and material worlds of games and its technologies was top of mind for attendees.

The Beautiful Game at Toronto Games Week

As part of the wider activities at Toronto Games Week, the Broken Games Collective partnered with the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the UTM Library to install a one-week exhibit on soccer video games from the past 50 years.The exhibit was part of a physical display that ran from the 11th to 17th of June in the Earth Rangers Studio in the ROM. 

The exhibit featured 12 games from the Syd Bolton Collection at UTM Library, including 5 playable games, such as Pelé's Soccer on the Atari VCS, Nintendo World Cup on the Nintendo Entertainment System, World Championship Soccer on the Sega Genesis, Virtua Striker 2 on the Sega Dreamcast, and Super Mario Strikers on the Nintendo GameCube. The exhibit combined a series of soccer games striving for 2D and 3D simulation and realism to games that focused on spectacle and having fun. 

Over the week there were close to 5,000 visitors. The largest one-day attendance was on Tuesday the 16th when the ROM had its Third Tuesday Night free. While the physical display is no longer active the UTM Library continues to host a digital exhibit of the items and descriptions featured during the week-long event.

Call for Papers: Volatile Memory

We’re happy to announce a new Call for Papers from Dr Jean Ketterling, Dany Guay-Belanger, and Broken Games Collective member Michael Iantorno. Volatile Memory: Game Preservation Policy and Practice in Canada is an edited collection designed to bring together the perspectives of scholars, institutional actors, and citizen archivists to assess and address the growing problem of videogame preservation in Canada (and around the world). 

It’s not just for academics either! The call is open to essays, material studies, and interviews that focus on game preservation policy and practice.

The full call for papers can be found at: https://gamepreservation.ca/volatile-memory/. If you’re interested, please submit a 500 word abstract (reference list not included) and 200 word bio to the editors by November 15, 2026. Completed submissions and questions should be sent to [email protected]. 

Game Preservation News Roundup

Redumper, the open source tool for preserving disc-based media, was earlier this year made compatible with additional optical drives: Support was added for RibShark’s OmniDrive firmware, which enables inexpensive Blu-ray drives in the MT1959 chipset family to read whole sectors, including hidden data that consumer drives typically can’t output. Researchers and preservationists can now cheaply and accurately dump several formats of game discs, plus raw Blu-rays and DVDs.

There was a surprise bump in Casio Loopy interest earlier this year, when ThroatyMumbo revealed an “unfinished” port of DOOM to the Japan-only console known for its integrated full-colour sticker printer. Floopy Drive, the only flash cart available for the system, briefly sold out and had to go back to manufacturing to meet the demand.

RetroOnyx, the specialized hardware company known for its Virtual Boy flash cartridges with e-ink displays, is selling a replacement for the Virtual Boy gamepad internals that turns it into a Switch-compatible controller. The idea is to combine it with Nintendo’s official VB headset for the Switch/Switch 2 and the official VB software to enable a truly authentic gameplay experience. So far Nintendo has released 17 Virtual Boy games for its Nintendo Switch Online service (16 outside of Japan), including two previously unreleased titles D-Hopper and Zero Racers.

The Video Game History Foundation now has over 5000 magazines preserved and searchable in its collection. In September the non-profit group announced a major upgrade to its research tools, now with added Japanese language support including right-to-left page display and accurate Japanese text search.

Special Thanks

Thank you to our partners for supporting our events: Game Arts International Network, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto Game Expo, Toronto Games Week, and University of Toronto Mississauga Library.