But on the whole, you will experience some analogue of the MS-DOS program, in your browser, instantly. 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. “I really worked hard to have only fully-functioning programs up, or at least, programs that gave viable, useful feedback. Brain and Leisure Suit Larry and a ton of other Sierra games.īut wait! Before you head over, here are some words from Jason Scott, who did a lot of the legwork on this: Yes, it includes The Incredible Machine and King’s Quest and Island of Dr. Yes, it includes some (but not all) Infocom games. Yes, that includes Duke Nukem 3Dand Wolfenstein 3D. And did I mention you can play every single game in your browser, thanks to the power of JSMESS and DOSBox?
After adding early console emulation back in 2013, then adding 900 arcade games to the mix last year, the Internet Archive has now made over 2,000 MS-DOS games available for free. So if guilt is in any way preventing you from playing these archived games, hopefully this assuages that a bit.The Internet Archive is turning into one hell of a games repository. Still, it seems like the IA is at least trying to keep this within the letter of some kind of copyright law. We can probably assume that the Copyright Office hasn't made any recent changes to its exemptions that would make what's been done here an issue, but given that the most recent confirmation of the exemption is from nearly 10 years ago, it's tough to say for certain. It's worth noting that the exemption notice is from 2003, and it was evidently renewed in 2006.
If you have a lot of spare hours in your day and would like to spend some of them trying to figure out if you remember any of Carmen Sandiego's world history lessons, great news! The Internet Archive-the people behind the Internet Wayback Machine and the browser-based Console Living Room-has just gone and added 2,388 MS-DOS games to its Software Library.Īmong them, you can find any number of classics, like edutainment stalwart The Oregon Trail, the turn-based space strategy game Master of Orion, and Taito's Bust-a-Move, which I only mention because the MS-DOS version of Bust-a-Move was the only one I ever played as a kid.