What better way to celebrate the cold winter weather than by embracing your inner child and playing some classic MS-DOS games? Yep, that's right gamers, you can now play Oregon Trail and other classics on any browser thanks to the Internet Archive. There's no better time to "work from home."
Known for its Wayback Machine, which allows us to look at home pages of the past, and the similar console living room project which brought Atari games to browsers, the Internet Archive is bringing back our favorite MS-DOS childhood games.
Seriously what is cooler than choosing whether to fork the river or float across in hopes that one trail member "accidentally" dies while playing Oregon Trail on your brand new MacBook?
Of course we want to waste time embrace our inner 80s and 90s love while avoiding dysentery on the Trail, but there are also about 2,400 other MS-DOS games available for free on the Internet Archive.
While many of these games can already be played online, this project is the perfect way to preserve classic games that are part of the history of gaming. Behind the project is software curator Jason Scott who has asked gamers to explore the archives and provide feedback on what is and isn't woking for users.
"I really worked hard to have only fully-functioning programs up, or at least, programs that gave viable, useful feedback," he wrote in a post on Monday. "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."
Other play-worthy games include: The Lion King, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, Stunts, L'Empereur, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Get your gaming on and check out the full achieve here.
[Photo Credit: Mollye Knox/Flickr]
