Your Monday blues are about to be vanquished with a button-mashing trip down memory lane. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that creates back-ups of every page of the Internet, has branched out on a new endeavor: the Internet Arcade. They’ve added a collection of 900 classic arcade video games from the 1970s through the 1990s, and you can play them all for free on your web browser.
The 'Bronze Age' of Video Games
Classics like Frogger and Pac Manare begging you to squander hours of productivity as you relive the triumph of setting a new high score on
In addition to more popular titles, the collection also includes a boatload of obscure games that harken back to the “bronze age” of videogames (they’re literally in black and white). The man behind the project, Jason Scott, said he hopes a small percentage of people will use the games collection in research, writing or remixing the old games into something new. Clearly, most people will just want to have fun. Scott wrote on his blog:
“Obviously, a lot of people are going to migrate to games they recognize and ones that they may not have played in years. They’ll do a few rounds, probably get their asses kicked, smile, and go back to their news sites.”
To be clear, not every game is going to operate perfectly; some games have control mechanisms that don’t translate well to a keyboard. However, Scott said his team would continue to clean up some of the hiccups that exist on the site.
Credit: Internet Arcade If you grow weary of the Internet Arcade, you can jump over to the Internet Archive’s project from last year: The Console Living Room. There, you can play early console games from the Atari 2600 and 7800, the Magnavox Odyssey, ColecoVision and even Sega Genesis. Or, you can take a ride on the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" to see what some of your favorite websites looked like years ago. So pull up a secret browser, tilt your screen away from your coworkers’ line of sight, and start gunning down some space invaders.
