Project story
Where RetroHub comes from, and what it is not.
The television used to do more than television
In the late 1980s, Vidéotron plugged something into Quebec's cable network that had no equivalent anywhere in North America: the Vidéoway. In service by the autumn of 1989 and officially launched on 24 January 1990, it turned the living-room television into a device you could question. You keyed in a number and a mosaic of coloured tiles opened up: news, weather, horoscope, stock quotes, road conditions, television listings — about two dozen services at the start. And games, some forty of them, played by several people in front of the same screen.
The service ran for sixteen years. It was shut down on 26 April 2006.
The Wikipedia article on the Vidéoway tells its technical history in detail — in French; there is no English article.
Games nobody can play again
These games ran on no console, were sold in no shop, installed on nothing. They lived inside the terminal, and the terminal belonged to the cable company. When the service went dark, they went dark with it.
Writing in Le Bêta-Testeur on 18 September 2026, Patrick Tremblay noted that several of them are now considered lost media. All that remains of them are memories and a few video recordings.
Read the article (in French): “Et si jouer au Videoway était possible aujourd'hui?”
That is where RetroHub comes from
RetroHub was born of that absence. Not from an archive, not from a recovered file: from a memory, and from a few recordings watched frame by frame. The screen is 320 by 240 pixels, the palette holds sixteen colours, the typeface was drawn by hand. Nothing was copied from an original — everything was redrawn, pixel by pixel, to recover a feeling.
The first lines were written on 12 August 2026. Three weeks later, on 5 September, RetroHub was on sale on Google Play, the Microsoft Store and the App Store — phone, tablet, computer and television. It has moved at the pace of its users' feedback ever since.
What RetroHub is not
RetroHub has no connection to Vidéotron, to Québecor, or to the Vidéoway.
It is not an official product. It is not a sequel, a version 2 or a revival. It is not an emulator: none of the original terminal's code, data or content is in it, and none of the games of that era is reproduced.
It is an independent work, made by Réseau Inter-Système inc., that sets out to rekindle the spirit of an era — the mosaic, the two-digit number, the shared controller, the wait in front of a tile that is loading. The names mentioned on this page are here to tell where the project comes from. They belong to their respective owners.
Not locking ourselves into the inventory
Rebuilding the 1992 line-up and stopping there would be a museum, not a terminal. So RetroHub embraces games that never existed — but that could have been there: same constraints, same screen, same palette, same way of being played by two people on a couch. The question is not “did this exist?”, it is “could this have been on the screen in 1993?”.
And if you want the period only
That is provided for, and it takes two seconds. Under Settings → Appearance:
- Period Experience — the turquoise grid of the day, and only what belongs to that era;
- Period Experience + — the same look, with every service;
- RetroHub Classic — the RetroHub colours.
The terminal is yours. You decide what year it is.
And then the room around it was missing
A terminal was never just a screen. It was a living room, a couch, a cathode-ray television in a melamine cabinet, and somebody beside you waiting for their turn.
RetroHub VR puts the room back around the screen. Released on 23 October 2026 on the Meta Horizon Store, it sits you down in front of the television of a 1990s apartment — the same terminal, the same games, seen from the armchair. You are no longer looking at the era: you are inside it.