Last night I was watching the local news because my remote control was far away and they ran a segment about a bar in Manhattan with an impressive collection of arcade games and over two dozen craft beers on tap. It seemed like a cool place to spend a night but then I read about the Internet Archive’s effort to host a collection of classic arcade games on their site that are playable from the comfort of my living room without requiring me to expend beer money or the effort to put on a shirt and it was in that moment that I once again declared that the internet was a superior thing.
On Saturday, the vast digital library announced the release of the Internet Arcade, which has translated more than 900 old arcade games into versions you can now play in your Web browser. In your pajamas. Without any coins.
The archive’s titles are from the 1970s through 1990s, and include classics like Pac-Man Plus, Defender, Q*bert, Street Fighter II and Atari favorites like Paperboy and Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom.
The project is an outgrowth of a larger, decades-long project called JSMESS, which emulates hundreds of different computer systems, says Jason Scott, who worked on the Internet Arcade project.
Unfortunately for a console brat like me that missed the arcade golden age and only supplemented my formative gaming years with the occasional trip to an arcade in the mid-’90s, the Internet Arcade doesn’t have the titles that I’m most familiar with like NBA Jam and The X-Men, but the beauty of the site is that there is actually a bit of effort put into explaining what these games are when you click on their logos. Fun, educational, and counter-productive to my need to experience direct sunlight on a daily basis. The Internet Arcade has it all!
Via The LA Times