Fireside Chat, Exhibit

Toronto Games Week 2024

Retro Games Play and Preserve Forum

For our second year at Toronto Games Week, the Broken Games Collective took over the Browsery at Toronto Reference Library for a day of hands-on game preservation. More than 150 people came through over the course of the day!

We brought games and systems from the University of Toronto Mississauga Library’s Syd Bolton Collection and from my own collection, and set them up as a few different stations:

Last Chance to Play: rare systems that are hard to find in working order, including Hotel Mario on the Philips CD-i, Virtua Racing Deluxe on the Sega 32X, Teleroboxer on the Nintendo Virtual Boy, and the Vectrex. A crowd gathered around Hotel Mario to play it together!
What’s in a Game?: three home versions of Donkey Kong side by side, on the Atari VCS, Intellivision and ColecoVision.
Preservation Station: visitors brought their own cartridges to clean, and to back up with a Sanni Cart Reader. People lined up to get their games saved.
Photo booth: selfies with a Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer.

Fireside chat with Phil Salvador

For the main event, I sat down with Phil Salvador, Library Director at the Video Game History Foundation, to talk about the VGHF, his work, and game preservation.

Phil talked about his recent testimony to the US Copyright Office, in support of exemptions that would let libraries and archives share materials with researchers remotely. It was backed by a VGHF study with the Software Preservation Network, which found that “87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered”.

We also talked about how hard it can be to re-release old games legally, even when everyone involved wants it to happen. For example, the remaster of Konami’s X-Men arcade game was only available for three years, and even then its voice acting had to be re-recorded.

Finally, we talked about why the context around a game matters as much as the game itself. Phil asked, “What does it mean to preserve baseball?” Just having the rules and statistics doesn’t capture what baseball is. In the same way, a copy of Fortnite’s final code would tell us very little without recordings of its in-game concerts and events.

Thanks to Phil for joining us, and to Game Arts International Network (GAIN) for helping to bring him to Toronto for the first time!