ZKEX is a digital archaeology bureau. We excavate games from obsolete media — corroded hard drives, decaying magnetic tape, and formats the industry forgot. Most of what we recover is broken. We restore what we can. The rest becomes evidence.
Recovered from a Maxell XLII-90 found in a flooded storage locker in Rotterdam. A synthwave racer that never shipped. Graphics intact. Soundtrack corrupted beyond repair — replaced with ambient hum from the tape itself.
Load tape →Pulled from a Zip disk found in a thrift store in Portland. A social experiment disguised as a chat client. Messages fade after being read three times. Half the text is unrecoverable. We've reconstructed what we could.
Load tape →Extracted from a 5.25" floppy discovered in a shoebox in a Cleveland estate sale. A logistics sim written in QBasic. The executable runs but crashes after 4 minutes. Source code partially intact. We're rebuilding it by hand.
Load tape →Recovered from a MiniDisc found in a Berlin record store. An audio exploration game where you tune into ghost frequencies. Every playthrough reveals new transmissions. The disc surface is pristine — almost suspiciously so.
Load tape →ZKEX operates from a decommissioned Cold War bunker beneath the Rokin district in Amsterdam. Six archivists work in climate-controlled chambers maintained at 14°C and 35% humidity. We wear cotton gloves. We don't eat near the drives.
Our mandate is preservation through restoration. When a format dies, we become its undertakers. When a game disappears, we become its ghost. We've recovered data from fire-damaged CDs, waterlogged hard drives, and floppy disks that spent a decade in an attic.
The vault holds 847 physical artifacts. We've extracted 23 playable experiences. Nine are stable. Five are partial reconstructions. The rest are digital fossils — beautiful in their incompleteness. Sometimes the corruption *is* the art.
Can identify a disc rot pattern by smell. Spent three years extracting data from a drive submerged in canal water. Sleeps four hours a night in a hammock in the vault. Refuses to use USB sticks on principle.
Maintains working examples of 47 obsolete storage formats. Has a functional Apple IIe, a Zip drive, and a MiniDisc deck. Knows the pinout of a 34-pin floppy connector by heart. Doesn't own a smartphone.
Rebuilds corrupted executables byte by byte. Once spent six months reconstructing a 12KB QBasic program from printed source listings found in a landfill. The resulting game ran for 47 seconds before crashing beautifully.