The Museum Racing to Save Worlds Before They Switch Off

Virtual Worlds Museum Teleportal, mapping the metaverse

Switch off a Game Boy and nothing is lost. The game sits in the cartridge, patient and complete, waiting for the next set of batteries, whether that is tomorrow or in fifty years. Switch off a virtual world and it can be gone for good: the servers wiped, the login dead, the place where thousands of people met simply erased, with nothing left in a drawer to rediscover. That single, unsettling difference is the whole reason the Virtual Worlds Museum exists, and it is why a museum devoted to a 1989 handheld feels such kinship with it.

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  VWM - The Conservation Project

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  VWM - The Conservation Project

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  VWM - The Conservation Project

A Museum for Places That Might Vanish

The Virtual Worlds Museum is a digital museum archiving the history of virtual worlds and the wider metaverse. Founded and directed by Julian Reyes, it has already been recognised with the 2025 AUREA Impact Award and a place among the M100 Spectrum Metaverse Innovators, and it was built with the help of a successfully funded Kickstarter. Its motto is refreshingly plain for a field drowning in jargon: explore, preserve, inspire.

The scope is enormous. The museum tracks the platforms that defined online life for whole generations, from Active Worlds and Habbo and Second Life to VRChat, Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Meta's Horizon Worlds. It sorts them into exhibits, from WebXR and open-source worlds to blockchain experiments. And, most poignantly, it keeps an exhibit for "Sunset Worlds": the places that have already been switched off for the last time.

That is preservation at its most urgent, because once one of these worlds closes, there is often nothing left to collect.

Mapping the Metaverse

The centrepiece is the Teleportal, an interactive map and gateway to the worlds the museum tracks. Think of it as an atlas of the metaverse, turning preservation into something you can wander through rather than just read about. It exists in five versions, which tells you how seriously the team takes access: a 3D force graph that renders the platforms as a drifting constellation, a clickable index organised in category rings, a simplified 2D viewer built for classrooms, a VR build in testing on Meta Quest, and a spatial edition being adapted with WebSpatial for Apple Vision Pro and Pico. You do not need a headset for the browser versions, which is how most of us will explore it. Where our own collection is a map of one machine, the Teleportal is a map of an entire, shifting continent of them.

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  The Teleportal's 3D force graph, mapping virtual world platforms as a network of connected nodes

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  The Teleportal's 3D force graph, mapping virtual world platforms as a network of connected nodes

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  The Teleportal VR build, currently in testing on Meta Quest

Two Ends of the Same Mission

It would be hard to imagine two museums more different on the surface. One preserves a small grey object you can hold, photographing every cartridge and box; the other preserves vast, intangible spaces that exist only while a company keeps the power on. And yet the mission is identical: make sure the history is still there when someone goes looking for it.

If anything, our jobs are mirror images. We fight decay, the yellowing plastic and the leaking battery, and we have written before about how to keep an original Game Boy alive. The Virtual Worlds Museum fights disappearance, the far more sudden death of a world that is perfectly healthy right up until the moment it is deleted. Between us, the tangible and the intangible sides of play both get a record.

A Museum That Maps Other Museums

There is a lovely detail that brought our two worlds together in the first place. Alongside everything else, the Virtual Worlds Museum keeps a directory of game museums, physical and virtual alike, a museum that maps other museums, so that anyone curious about where gaming history is being kept can actually find it. That is how the Game Boy Museum came to be listed among them, and it is exactly the kind of connective work the scene needs.

If you spend your days, as we do, thinking about how to keep gaming history from slipping away, the Virtual Worlds Museum is well worth your time. You can explore the Teleportal and the whole archive at virtualworlds.museum, and the museum's interviews with the people who build these worlds live on its Teleportal TV channel.

That series is a team effort, and Julian Reyes is quick to say so. Teleportal TV and the museum's Spotlight video series exist thanks to Evo Heyning, Carlos Austin, Steve Van Loon and Rachael Newport.

Different technology, same stubborn belief: that the places and machines we played on are worth keeping, long after the world has moved on to the next thing.