The Internet Archive has been stocking historic games since 2013 but they’ve welcomed in the new year by adding a further 2,400 MS-DOS games to their archive.
You can play everything from Jazz Jackrabbit, to Duke Nukem, to Dune 2. The archive is packed full of classic games and some porn, too.
The Internet Archive hopes to store historic documents which might otherwise be overlooked. It’s memory banks hold books, films, music, and (since 2013) games. Everything is held digitally so as to avoid any format restrictions.
More than 5 million people have visited The Internet Archive’s Arcade since it launched. There they could play the original Pac Man, Chuckie Egg, even The Hobbit.
“I really worked hard to have only fully-functioning programs up, or at least, programs that gave viable, useful feedback,” archivist Jason Scott writes. “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’s also managed to link the archive to Mobygames’ database. where possible, each game page will list off information about its developers and publishing history.
All the games can be played in your browser without needing to download anything to your desktop.
Oh, I did mention the porn games, right? Here’s Sex Vixens from Space. in which “Dashing hero-heartthrob of the future Brad Stallion is assigned by the Federated Government to locate and neutralize “The Tribe” — a band of space-Amazon raiders spreading interstellar terror with their emasculating Sex-ray guns.”