When The Internet Archive announced that it was making 900 old arcade games from the 90's available to stream through the internet, I was interested, but not overly excited. I played very few arcade games as a child... we rarely left the house and when we did we were to poor to throw quarters away into arcade machines. A relative had a pacman machine, so I played some of that, but arcade games were never a huge part of my youth, so when I heard about the old games being available it was with a sense of interest that I perused the list, not of nostalgia.
This was not the case when I saw an article stating that now along with these games, one could also find 2,400 DOS games to download or stream. There are not words to express my excitement when I saw this article. Everyone is all excited about Oregon Trail, and sure, I get it, it's iconic... but I never played Oregon Trail, so I wasn't super stoked about that. But I played tons of the other games on this list. Many were "shareware" back in the day... meaning DRM free and open for distribution. As I looked through the list of games I was submerged in a wave of nostalgia. I was, again, a small child on my Grandfather's lap, noting that he always smelled of onions and bitter coffee, listening intently to the best way to defeat evil vegetables with the help of Commander Keen. I was taken back to sitting in "the library" of the house I grew-up in, slogging through the ridiculous load times of the Commodore 128/64 that the same technology loving Grandfather had given us, just to play Marble Madness or Pole Position. I was a child, living in a rural small town with few people my age, whose family had just been given a new 286 PC and couldn't wait to save some Lemmings with her older brother, or find out exactly where in time Carmen was hiding today... and I distinctly remember that game was 6 5.25" floppy disks, 6!
This was the era I was born into, the era of video games, the internet, online community -- working, playing, building together. And going through this game list was like sitting down with a box of books I hadn't read in twenty years, I remember the smell of the pages, the names of the characters, but not how they end - It is all at once old and new... like unwrapping a gift and it being a favorite old sweatshirt. In the same way that Nancy Drew made me a lifelong reader, these games were the gateway to me becoming a "girl who games."
Today I sat with my six-year old and showed him the amazing games of my youth... and let's admit it, they're still great games! He was drawn in by the "vile henchmen" of Carmen Sandiego, stressed out by the puzzles in "The Castle of Dr. Brain," excited by the nature photography in "Duck Tales." That's why these games are preserved, so my children can see my excitement about the games that were to me what Minion Rush is to them. Because even though their graphics and sound quality are obsolete by a couple decades, these games were well crafted, well thought out, and lots of fun. These are the game forefathers, let's pay them a visit and share them with a new generation of gamers.
Disclaimer: DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT let your kids peruse this list of games without supervision. Some are HIGHLY inappropriate!
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