You might remember back around New Year’s when we posted about over 2,000 classic MS DOS games making their way online for folks to enjoy in browser. It was pretty cool, but allegedly the stakes have been raised by the same group of MS DOS games. That’s because you can supposedly play them in your Twitter feed by pasting a link.
Okay, this is pretty cool. https://t.co/UrngX0VYrr
— Matt Brian (@m4tt) April 30, 2015
I say supposedly because Twitter is currently full of Tweets like the one above, featuring a link to the game and no ability to play it within the post itself. It did work and people were posting games all over Twitter, but it has been removed for some reason or something went wrong. Here’s The Guardian outlining a bit of the discovery from earlier:
Following the Internet Archives release of 2,600 MS-DOS games for streaming in the browser, users have discovered that classics such as Castle Wolfenstein, Lemmings, Zool and Commander Keen can be embedded directly into tweets.
The games will now show up as clickable, playable games right in people’s Twitter stream, the same way pictures, gifs and videos do with rich-media cards.
The 2,600 Microsoft Disk Operating System games are a subsection of the Internet Archive’s MS-DOS software collection, curated by American activist and historian of technology Jason Scott.
Now according to the always reliable Daily Mail, the ability to play the games in Twitter was the result of a secret feature. I don’t fully believe that, but I do believe Twitter might’ve had a hand at stopping random Javascript windows from running on their platform, hence the disappearance. That’s not confirmed, though, and the ability to play might be back by the time you read this.
Hopefully it is because there’s a nice selection to waste a little time on within the archive. It’s not the best quality, but being able to play games like Metal Gear and Street Fighter II in your browser is a cool feature.
(Via The Guardian / Wired)