Remember that time back in ’98 when you lost your mother in a tragic river-fording incident in the same voyage that your dad bit the dust to a mean case of dysentery? I’m speaking of course about “Oregon Trail,” the classic historically semi-accurate video game of the ’90s (if you thought I meant in real life, and you actually did remember that, I apologize).
Now you can relive all of those good times thanks to the power of the Internet. We first told you about the Internet Archive’s upload of hundreds of classic arcade games back in November. Now, the same website (where you can also listen to a whole bunch of Grateful Dead live recordings), is climbing of the ladder of time and hosting thousands of MS-DOS games— you know, those ones that were on the nifty floppy disks.
In addition to “Oregon Trail,” you can get free access to more than 2,400 other games including the ever popular “Lemmings,” “Duke Nukem,” and “Street Fighter II.” Unfortunately, this treasure trove of memories comes with its limitations. Some of the games are a little buggy, as noted by software curator Jason Scott in a perfectly fonted blog post.
“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,” he says. “But on the whole, you will experience some analogue of the MS-DOS program, in your browser, instantly.”
Unless you still use your floppy disk drive, however, this is still your best option for leading a buggy caravan westward. You can find all of the available games here. Also, I’d recommend hitting their Grateful Dead archive and seeing if the music syncs up with the games, dude.
[h/t The Washington Post]
