Duke Nukem 3D

Internet Archive brings over 2,000 free classic games to your browser

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Duke Nukem 3D is one of thousands of games free to play thanks to the Internet Archive

7 January 2015

The Internet Archive is turning into one hell of a games repository. After adding early console emulation back in 2013, then adding 900 arcade games last year, the Internet Archive has now made over 2,000 MS-DOS games available to play for free in your browser, thanks to the power of JSMESS and DOSBox.

Yes, that includes Duke Nukem 3D and Wolfenstein 3D. Yes, it includes some Lemmings titles. Yes, it includes Oregon Trail. Yes, it includes some Infocom games. Yes, it includes The Incredible Machine and King’s Quest and Island of Dr. Brain and Leisure Suit Larry and a ton of other Sierra games.

But don’t expect the same gameplay experience you had way back when. As Jason Scott, who did a lot of the legwork, explained: “I really worked hard to have only fully-functioning programs up, or at least, programs that gave viable, useful feedback. Some of them will still fall over and die, and many of them might be weird to play in a browser window, and of course you can’t really save things off for later, and that will limit things too. But on the whole, you will experience some analogue of the MS-DOS program, in your browser, instantly.”

As Scott says, the lack of save games is the biggest issue right now. Even so, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to mess around with for an afternoon – probably the most consumer-friendly way to use DOSBox so far.

The main question is whether companies will let it stand. While some of these games are certainly abandonware and thus in the legal grey area where emulation is sort of “wink-nod legal” albeit frowned upon, other games are still actively being sold today – like, for instance, Duke Nukem 3D, which is on sale in this week’s Humble Bundle. It would be terrible to see companies bring legal action against the Internet Archive over 20-year-old games, but it could happen.

PCWorld

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