An online warehouse designed as a one-stop-shop for thousands of backdated books, software, audio files and game emulators has sprung up and has been taking the internet by storm since 1996. The Internet Archive is quick, simple to navigate, and most importantly 100% free.
We’ve all been there. Desperate to play our favourite Sega Genesis game only to find the console laid up and busted in the loft. Emulators have been the perfect way around this sad fact of life for yearsm but frequently don’t work or require timely updates to stay usable.
The archive also contains hundreds of Arcade classics.
The Internet Archive emulators are playable directly from your browser but fair warning, it works best on Chrome and Firefox. To be honest though if you’re using Internet Explorer this is probably the least of your problems. You can search by consoles, by software or by games, with the likes of Sonic The Hedgehog, Mortal Kombat and Doom all available to play. The console controls can be a bit dodgy on account of them not being mapped for computer but after a while randomly pressing keys, you’ll have the basics down. Here’s a quick link to a few of our favourites:
Mortal Kombat
Wolfenstein 3D
Street Fighter II
The Archive has set out to create a complete backup of our online culture. The key man behind the MS-DOS portion of the site, Jason Scott, says on his TextFiles blog, “If people can’t see or interact with software, it disappears. Utterly … We’re in a world where computer and software history runs in browsers….” Here’s hoping they get on an archive of modern era games pretty sharpish. Y’know, for antiquities sake.
Mark is the Gaming Editor for UNILAD. Having grown up a gaming addict, he’s been deeply entrenched in culture and spends time away from work playing as much as possible. Mark studied music at University and found a love for journalism through going to local gigs and writing about them for local and national publications.