According to an article on GameSpot, some 900 classic, arcade games are now available for you to play, all you need is a web browser...and if you're reading this piece, you're ready to veg out on some old-school arcade goodness.
They're all being kept for posterity over at The Internet Archive, thanks to the efforts of Jason Scott and those who worked on JSMESS (or JavaScript Mess), a massive emulation project meant to port a multiplatform emulator into the JavaScript language. JSMESS has been successful at booting into a wide range of computers, and that left Scott wondering if arcade platforms could be supported.
"I decided to futz around with our build environment (which, it must be absolutely stressed, the other JSMESS team members built, not me), just to ask the question, 'And how hard would it be to build arcade games, anyway?'" Scott wrote on his blog. "It turned out to be easy. Very, very easy."
The result is The Internet Arcade, which Scott announced this morning on his personal blog. It's a good bet that something you recall from the halcyon days of '80s arcade ephemera is housed in this digital archive.
That said, while many of the games were port-able, no guarantee is made that all are fully playable. Some had unusual controls or controllers that just don't translate well to a keyboard layout. In other cases, vector graphics have trouble rendering, and still in others, the sound is off...but the majority are perfectly playable.
They follow the standard MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) convention where 5 on your keyboard deposits the credit and 1 begins a 1-player game, with the arrow keys moving in those directions and the keys to the left or right of the space bar serving as action buttons.
"Obviously, a lot of people are going to migrate to games they recognize and ones that they may not have played in years." Scott wrote. "They'll do a few rounds, probably get their asses kicked, smile, and go back to their news sites.
A few more, I hope, will go towards games they've never heard of, with rules they have to suss out, and maybe more people will play some of these arcades in the coming months than the games ever saw in their "real" lifetimes.
And my hope is that a handful, a probably tiny percentage, will begin plotting out ways to use this stuff in research, in writing, and remixing these old games into understanding their contexts. Time will tell.
