 For our third year at Toronto Games Week, we focused on handheld video game systems. Our event, Portable Preservation, took place at the Royal Ontario Museum in the Earth Rangers Studio on June 17, 2025. In the centre of the room, we built an exhibit displaying a timeline of handheld video game consoles (and some interesting peripherals), from the Nintendo Game & Watch up until the final entry of the 3DS family. Each display case was accompanied by an info sheet with basic facts about each artefact. It was heartwarming to hear the many comments from visitors who recognized an old favourite: including parents introducing the original Game Boy to their kids… or lamenting that a plaything from their youth should appear in a museum! 😅 Around the edges of the room, we set up our interactive displays. More than 700 visitors got to play, sew, photograph, and cheer each other on with a variety of systems and accessories. For the Broken Games Collective, giving people a chance to get hands-on with intriguing video game artefacts is a big part of what preservation means to us. Now You're Playing with... PlayStation? An undercurrent of the event was the astonishing number of ways to play Game Boy games. Highlighting one bizarre comparison was Tetris for the Game Boy set up on a Super Famicom using a Super Game Boy 2, side-by-side with an original PlayStation using a Super GB Booster accessory. A strange chimera, Game Boy cartridges plug into the Super GB Booster, which plugs into the parallel port on early models of the PlayStation. Both setups allow for playing Game Boy games on a television, but while the official Super Game Boy 2 experience is accurate to the original, the unofficial Super GB Booster produces unpredictable (though fascinating!) glitches during gameplay.  Not Exactly Handheld We also brought the Vectrex and the Nintendo Virtual Boy to share our love for self-contained systems that, while they won't fit in your pocket, are meant to be conveniently transported and set up anywhere. Both have surprising revivals coming in the new year! The Vectrex has a built-in vector-based display that draws perfect lines from point to point on screen—rather than a series of horizontal lines as used in a traditional CRT television—giving it a unique look with jaw-dropping scaling effects for the era. It's impossible to fully replicate on modern displays, but a Vectrex Mini was announced in August 2025 at Gamescom that will attempt to simulate the experience using an AMOLED display. Rarely mentioned by Nintendo since its discontinuation in 1996, the Virtual Boy is a 3D gaming headset with a distinct red display and a handful of fun games. In one of the most surprising video game announcements ever, Nintendo revealed in September 2025 that the Virtual Boy would be revived for the Switch and Switch 2 with a custom stand that recreates the look and feel of the original system.  Sewing Attendees got to try their hand at the Jaguar JN-100, also known as the Game Boy Sewing Machine. Instead of inventing a whole new digital interface, the idea was instead to connect an existing, familiar device to the sewing machine for its screen and controls: the Game Boy. In much the same way that modern smartphones can now control devices around the home, the Game Boy is used to choose stitches, and more! Game Boy Selfies One of the most popular stations was the area for taking photos with Game Boy Cameras. Released in 1998, the Game Boy Camera was for many their first experience using a digital camera. Thanks to aftermarket sticker paper still being manufactured today (original supplies have all since expired), visitors were also able to print out and take home their selfies. The Big Screen Inspired by the groups of people who gathered to collaboratively play Hotel Mario together at last year's event, we used the room's largest screen to present Donkey Kong 94 using an Analogue Super Nt and Super Game Boy 2. The fan-favourite game turned out to be a little more difficult to rally around than the comparatively simple Hotel Mario, but there were still plenty of cheers as folks worked their way through DK94's many levels. The Full List
Want to see the full list of the systems, accessories, and games that we brought to the event? Click "read more" below! We can't wait to see you next year!
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 Retro Games Play and Preserve Forum is a two-part event that took place on June 15, 2024. during Toronto Games Week. In Toronto Reference Library's Browsery area, we set up three areas:
For the main event, Phil Salvador, Library Director at the Video Game History Foundation joined us for a fireside chat. He shared his thoughts on what preservation means, difficulties in capturing the full context around games, and the advocacy work of the Foundation. Want to know more? Join our newletter and see the archive to get the full details! The BGC was part of a zine that shows off a game preservation efforts that are currently happening across Canada. Distributed at CGSA and TGW, the project included contributions from Alex Custodio, Dany Guay-Bélanger, Francis Lavigne, Chris Young, and Derek Quenneville – from the Residual Media Depot, LUDOV, the Syd Bolton Collection, and the Broken Games Collective. In case you missed getting a copy in person, we’ve now made Old Games Zine 2024 available online as a printable PDF. Feel free to download it and print as many copies as you like!  Never made a zine before? You can check out this excellent guide from Taylor Wright Rushing on how to fold and cut zines. Just make sure you center the PDF on the page when you print (and that you’re not scaling or “fitting” it to the print area).
 Preservation Through Play is a talk and hands-on workshop that ran at Toronto Public Library as part of Toronto Games Week 2023, featuring Derek Quenneville, and Dr. Chris Young, curator of the Syd Bolton Collection at University of Toronto. Derek spoke about different ways that preservation is achieved, and why simply copying the data for a game isn’t enough. Chris shared details of his work and the the Syd Bolton Collection, and walked attendees through institutional preservation, using a Nintendo 64 cartridge as an example. |
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