About this project
No nostalgia required.
A selective archive of older games that still earn your time — not because they were important, but because they still play.
- Playable today Official port, rerelease, or a legitimate modern route. If access is implausible, it doesn't belong here.
- Mechanically honest A game can be old without asking for forgiveness. The archive favours design that still speaks clearly.
- Curated, not canonical Influence is not enough. Historical importance is interesting, but it is not the test.
- No nostalgia required The ideal reader did not grow up with the game and still finds something alive in it now.
The project
Cartridge Collective is a solo editorial project, established in 2026 and updated only when something worth writing about surfaces. Selected for how they play now, not how they are remembered.
Browse the archiveThe collection
About me
The taste behind the archive.
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum. A Master System arrived around 1991, a SNES in 1993 — still my favourite platform of anything, ever, for the library, the era, the philosophy of tight 2D design with nothing wasted — and then an Amiga, a long stretch on PC, and eventually a Wii, PS4, Switch, and a Steam Deck that goes everywhere. More than twenty years working in technology sit alongside all of it.
These days I play games with my children, who are old enough to have opinions and young enough not to have reverence. It is a very good way to see which designs still communicate clearly and which are coasting on memory. Cartridge Collective was a long-brewing idea — part editorial project, part craft exercise in building the thing — and the archive reflects a broad but opinionated taste: no single genre loyalty, just a bias toward games where someone clearly gave a damn.