Following the Internet Archives release of 2,600 MS-DOS games for streaming in the browser, users have discovered that classics such as Castle Wolfenstein, Lemmings, Zool and Commander Keen can be embedded directly into tweets.
The games will now show up as clickable, playable games right in people’s Twitter stream, the same way pictures, gifs and videos do with rich-media cards.
The 2,600 Microsoft Disk Operating System games are a subsection of the Internet Archive’s MS-DOS software collection, curated by American activist and historian of technology Jason Scott.
I see your Wolfenstein and I raise you Street Fighter II https://t.co/Se7lUnnQqa
— Samuel Gibbs (@SamuelGibbs) April 30, 2015
The system uses the open source MS-DOS emulator DOSBox and javascript to run the games straight in the browser, and follows the Internet Archive’s 2013 release of early arcade and console games from as far back as the 1970s and its Console Living Room collection last year.
The Internet Archive’s mission is to create an internet library of sites, texts, images, movies and digital content, archived for posterity. But many of the games here are actively being sold by their creators, including Duke Nukem 3D, which was originally available through the Internet Archive but removed due to “issues with the item’s content.”
Whether other publishers will turn a blind eye to the Internet Archive’s collection remains to be seen, but for now your twitter stream is likely to be full of them.
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