Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/14/2500-ms-dos-games-enter-the-i.html
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It sure is great that posterity isn’t gonna miss out on such classics as, er,
Super Winnie the Pooh… and, um, Toi Acid Game
Oh, the hours of fun I had with Dvorak Typing!
Plus of course who could forget the Flanders family favourite, Bible Adventures:
Just kidding of course, this is fantastic stuff and the Internet Archive is truly a wonderful thing. I’m definitely gonna try Best of ZZT and am curious about the PC port of WipEout
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Alone in the Dark! Wow, that brings back some fond freshman HS memories - wonder if the polygon graphics hold up?
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A huge trove of ancient MS-DOS games are now available at the Internet Archive,
Sigh, now the games of my childhood are ancient. I guess I’d better start every tech discussion with the phrase, “Back in the day ancient personal computer times…” 
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Dammit, Rob! I was supposed to get some work done today…
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No time, but definitely coming back for Yie Ar. Hopefully it plays better than the worn-out arcade console I used to play back in the 80s.
I’d love to find Elevator Action in here, though.
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My Pis will be happy.
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Princess Maker 2 was a blast from the past.
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“…4 of them good.”
ETA: I can’t say archive.org isn’t giving fair warning, though. “Not all games are enjoyable to play.”
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Wow.
TIL almost all DOS games until about 1995 are familiar to me.
It turns out I was a bigger nerd than I thought and that moving near the ocean essentially ended my PC gaming time!
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I’ll have to browse these sometime! I have a fondness for a game I will never remember the name of. It was an RPG, if I recall. Norse-themed. ASCII-based, full ansi color, but no graphics. I can’t recall what the gameplay was like, I just really enjoyed it.
I don’t think it was a rogue-like - I seem to recall that the maps were static. I would have played it for the first time…probably prior to 1990.
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It seems that, like me, you are no Marcel Proust. Maybe we can find a digital Madeleine to unlock our own “À la recherche du temps perdu”.
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Googling around, if it wasn’t one of the ZZT games, it was something very like it. I remember it being earlier than 92, though
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There’s a subreddit for exactly that purpose (identifying half-remembered games):
https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmyjoystick/
Someone there might be able to help!
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They’d better have Commander Keen in there!
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I was surprised to learn recently that the Internet Archive has no magical copyright exemption and the only thing stopping some of this stuff from being taken down is that they have a substantial legal team and the rights-holders are relatively indifferent. Trixter invokes the phrase “beyond economic recovery”.
It’s a far cry from the weird old days, when people tried to justify offering downloads by saying “It’s legal if you delete them within 24 hours!” or “It’s not a copy, it’s a copy of my backup!” or “Do whatever you want with this program – the publisher isn’t a member of the IDSA!”
But I reckon a lot of these downloads are still hastily-copied, incomplete, cracked copies originating from the pirates of the day rather than properly-preserved images of installation media. On the other hand, there’s something to be said if most of them actually work in-browser with a minimum of fuss.
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Haha, of course there is. I’ll check it out!
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Lemme guess, 2,499 of those were imaged by Foone?
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