There’s a tactile joy to the humble 3.5″ floppy that no USB stick will ever match. It’s not just the way they thunk into place in a well-made drive, the eject button, too, is a tactile experience not to be missed. If you were a child in disk-drive days, you may have popped a disk in-and-out repeatedly just for the fun of it — and if you weren’t a child, and did it anyway, we’re not going to judge. [igor] has come up with a physical game called “Floppy Flopper” that provides an excuse to do just that en masse, and it looks like lots of fun.

It consists of nine working floppy drives in a 3×3 grid, all mounted on a hefty welded-steel frame. Each drive has an RGB LED above it. The name of the game is to swap floppies as quickly as possible so that the color of the floppy in the drive matches the color flashing above it. Each successful insertion is worth thirteen points, tracked on a lovely matrix display. Each round is faster than the last, until you miss the window or mix up colors in haste. That might make more sense if you watch the demo video below.

[igor] could have easily faked this with NFC tags, as we’ve seen floppy-like interfaces do, or perhaps just use a color sensor. But no, those nine drives are all in working order. In the interest of speed — this is a timed challenge, after all, and we don’t need a PC slowing it down — each floppy is given its own microcontroller. Rather than reading data off the disk, only the disk’s write-protect and density holes are checked. He’s only using R, G, and B for floppy colors, so those four bits are enough. Unfortunately [igor]’s collection of floppies is very professional — lots of black and grey — so he needed to use colored stickers instead of technicolor plastic.

The project is open source, if you happen to have a stack of floppy drives of your own. If you don’t, but still want to play, the area, the Floppy Flopper is being exhibited at RADIONA in Rijeka, Croatia until December 5th 2025. If you happen to be in the neighborhood, it might be worth a trip.

If we had a nickle for every physical game that used a floppy drive, we’d have two nickles just this year. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s kind of neat to see so long after the last diskettes came off the production lines.