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:

• Last Chance to Play, a retro arcade of rare and difficult-to-emulate games and hardware, including some from the Syd Bolton Collection.
• What's in a Game, an interactive exhibit to compare versions of Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600 VCS, ColecoVision, and Intellivision.
• Preservation Station, a hands-on area for attendees to learn how to clean and preserve games media, and have their own cartridge and save data backed up onto SD card.

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.

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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.

• Toronto Games Week official site
• Game Arts International Network
• Syd Bolton Collection​