Who can forget the old days of heading to the arcade, inserting a quarter or two and playing games with your friends after school? For those who grew up in this era and enjoyed combatting space aliens, street fighters and basketball this may very well be the greatest news since the invention of the iPhone.
It has been reported that the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization that seeks to create a digital library of the World Wide Web, has introduced more than 900 arcade games from the 1970s to the 1990s, which may not bode well for bosses and spouses everywhere for the next few days.
The titles are available to play for free and can be used in your browser. All of the games run on JSMESS, a JavaScript emulator, but there are some technical problems with some of the games. According to Internet Arcade operator Jason Scott, some of the controls couldn’t be translated to the keyboard and the scaling is out of whack for a few of the games.
And now people are hitting the arcade at 4 times the rate of the front page. Oh, it is Game Day at the archive.
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) November 3, 2014
Nonetheless, the introduction of the arcade library seems to be quite the hit. Scott noted on Twitter that this Internet Arcade page is bringing four times the number of people who visit the front page of the Internet Archive.
At the time of this writing, the webpage was placed offline for scheduled maintenance.
“When work began on JSMESS a couple years ago, I knew that it was probably somewhat easy to do all this conversion work for MAME (the arcade side) as it was for MESS (the computer and console side). I specifically chose not to, because I was not interested in a pile of work just to make another game platform. This was about software history, and it’s not that hard to get MAME up and running for the game or games you want to play,” wrote Scott in a blog post.
“Over the next few years, we got JSMESS working, and working pretty darn well – in a lot of cases, you can boot into a wide range of computers in your browser and it’s working great. There’s hiccups here and there, and we have work left to clean it up, but on the whole.. the proof exists. You can browse the historical software collection and the software library and wow, thousands of programs instantly there!”
Interested in taking the rest of the day off at work or skipping college classes? Here is a list of some of the games available to play now (or when the website goes back online): “Battle of Atlantis,” “Dig Dug,” “Rally X,” “Street Fighter II” and “Survival.”
This isn’t the first time that the website delved into the gaming arena. Late last year, it introduced 1970s and 1980s console games as part of its Console Living Room. Many games from Atari 2600 and 7800, Coleco Vision, Magnavox Odyssey and Astrocade have been added to the library.
At the time of this writing, this webpage is also offline for scheduled maintenance.
What classic arcade game will you play today that will bring back memories of your youth?
