Pretty Much Every MS-DOS Computer Game You Played As A Kid Has Been Released For Free Online

One year for Mother’s Day my dad bought mum a computer. She hated it and I’m pretty sure she cried. Floppy discs weren’t a thing yet so it ran on oversized cassette tapes. It had the classic green and black theme with the squarish font; no Helvetica or Comic Sans in sight.

I believe that epic Mother’s Day fail played a great part in shaping the late night streaming, fast typing, and slightly short-sighted person I am today. Huge parts of my childhood were spent playing Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, and a game where I was a worm and I had to go around spelling out words. I didn’t even mind that my parents had snuck an educational one in there because I was working with the future, baby.

As graphics, memory cards, and storylines evolved, the 8-bit soundtrack of my childhood was drowned out by the chaos of twelve year old boys and thirty-three year old men calling each other “fat accountants” or “prepubescent dickheads” over their WIFI networks. Like Woody in Toy Story, many of the MS-DOS games I had been so fond of were cast aside. Until now.

Those legends over at Internet Archive (which has everything you ever dreamed of), have collated a cool 2400 MS-DOS games that are all available to play, for free, right now. Like their drop of hundreds of old arcade games in November, you don’t even need to download them; they’re good to go in your browser!

Aside from being hugely nostalgic and an excellent time waster, this archive offers a portal into which we can look at our former selves. Games like Leisure Suit Larry, Soft Porn II, and Planet of Lust highlight the misogynistic “very questionable attitude towards sex, and especially towards women” in gaming.

We can track the evolution of voyeuristic behaviour through the progression of Sims. From SimLife, for animals; SimHealth, which sees the player controlling the health care system of early 1990’s America; to the ambitious SimEarth – The Living Planet; and everybody’s favourite, SimCity. Alternatively you can relive classic movie releases such as Wayne’s World, Gremlins, or Hook.

For me though, I’m sticking to the classics. My afternoon will be spent playing 1991’s definitive release, Scorched Earth. Weapon of choice, napalm.

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H/t Gizmodo.