Are you old enough to remember going into your school’s computer lab, sitting down at a blocky, large Mac computer, and booting up “Oregon Trail”? Now you can relive that experience, albeit on a much newer machine.
The Internet Archive, an online library most known for the Wayback Machine website archive, introduced a collection of over 2,000 MS-DOS games on Monday, giving players the opportunity to replay childhood favorites right in their web browsers.
Getting dysentery while trekking across the “Oregon Trail” isn’t the only digital memory you can replay. Other game releases in the MS-DOS library allow you to shoot aliens and chew bubblegum in “Duke Nukem,” fight your friends in “Street Fighter,” and relive childhood memories with “The Lion King.”
The collection was put together by Jason Scott, who previously worked on the Internet Arcade, a digitized assortment of coin-operated video games from as far back as the 1970s.
According to a blog post on Scott’s website, he utilized Mobygames, a game information database, and worked hard to make sure each game functioned properly.
“Some of them will still fall over and die, and many of them might be weird to play in a browser window, and of course you can’t really save things off for later, and that will limit things too. But on the whole, you will experience some analogue of the MS-DOS program, in your browser, instantly,” Scott said.
The Internet Archive includes thousands of other titles, including software from the Apple II and the Atari 800, which all run through an emulator in a browser. The non-profit has also compiled a list of historically important titles with information on context and influence.