The Internet Archive on Saturday released the Internet Arcade, a collection of 900 retro videogames originally seen in arcades and at-home consoles like the Atari — all free and playable directly from your browser.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Pac-Man Plus, Defender, Q*bert, Street Fighter II, Paperboy and more are all available, and users can browse the selection of games by platform or title.
The Internet Archive is most famous for its "Wayback Machine," which lets users view what websites looked like in the past. As museums are to artifacts and libraries are to books, the Internet Archive is to webpages.
The new Internet Arcade project, however, goes further back in the years — to before the birth of the mainstream Internet — to help catalog, preserve, and celebrate videogames from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
According to Wired magazine, the playability of the games is made possible by last year's JavaScript port of the MESS computer software emulator, a tool that helps run decades-old software on an Internet browser.
In keeping with the nostalgia of the arcade games, users can even insert digital coins into the games by pressing "5" on their keyboard.
The potential for future growth and uses of the digital arcade are plentiful, and one the project's leaders, Jason Scott,
said on his blog, "my hope is that a handful, a probably tiny percentage, will begin plotting out ways to use this stuff in research, in writing, and remixing these old games into understanding their contexts."
In the cult sci-fi novel "Ready Player One," the protagonist goes on a quest through videogame emulations to solve a puzzle that will save the real world in which he lives (and, of course, get the girl). That novel is set in the not too distant future, and with the birth of the Internet Archive, we're one step closer to living such futuristic stories.
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