2,400 MS-DOS games available to play and play — for free

Nearly 2,400 MS-DOS games are now available to play — for free — in almost any browser on the Internet Archive. Meaning: A lot of people of a certain generation are once again able to play the games they played over and over and over again as kids.

The Internet Archive is arguably best-known for its Wayback Machine, the neat and useful repository of home pages past. Many video game enthusiasts learned that over a year ago with the launch of the console living room, a similar project that brought early games (like those on the old Atari consoles) into the browser as playable emulations.

Here’s a sample of the playable games out there:

• Master of Orion: A super popular turn-based galactic conquest game that might remind some players of the Civilization series.

• The Oregon Trail: This game probably needs little introduction, but just in case: you travel from the east on the Oregon Trail like a pioneer — and it’s magical and addicting.

• The Lion King: What? I liked it when I was a kid. Deal.

There are a ton more, which you can explore at archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games. Some of the games are going to be buggy, but they’re working on it.

The MS-DOS project is likely to see similar popularity to the console experiment. Although this isn’t the first time some of these games have made it into a playable browser format, the Internet Archive’s undertaking is an unprecedented work of interactive preservation.