Gamers today have it easy: all you have to do now is load up Steam, press a button, and you're in the game. Back in the days of MS-DOS, every gamer needed to know basic programming just to get the games up and running.
Actually playing the games was another matter entirely (they were prone to crashing), and playing a game on a pre-Windows computer required a lot more work in general.
Nowadays, MS-DOS games are about as basic as they come. Some have stood the test of time (looking at you, Oregon Trail), but there's no denying that these games are relics from an entirely different age.
Games today can fill entire Blu-Ray discs with ease, while MS-DOS games take up less space than most selfies. In fact, they're so simple that you can embed and play them inside of another program entirely.
So if you've ever wanted to replay some old favorites, or try a game from another era, don't worry about downloading extra programs or finding illegal ROMs - just Tweet about it!
Best Tweet ever. https://t.co/4GAL3BUJGg
— Steven T. Schneider (@BaseDreadd) April 30, 2015
The idea of playing a game inside of a Tweet sounds ridiculous...and, to be honest, it is. Gunning down tiny Nazi soldiers or watching a tiny wagon try to cross a river inside of an entirely different social media app is hilariously backwards - it's the sort of feature that few people would ever think to include, and yet, here we are.
It's a testament to how far technology has come in such a short time: Wolfenstein 3D and The Oregon Trail (in the MS-DOS forms) are just over two decades old. This means that in 23 years, gaming has gone from bleeps and bloops to polygons and vertex shaders - or, if you want, you can play the bleeps and bloops in 140 characters or less.
If you'd like to try the games out for yourself, you can either click the embedded Tweet above or head over to the DOS Box archives.
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