UPDATED 11:10 EDT / APRIL 30 2015

NEWS

You can now embed classic MS-DOS games in tweets — here’s how

Twitter, Inc.’s financials may not be looking great right now, but users are still discovering new ways to use the microblog service to slack off at work. Earlier this year, the Internet Archive launched a free library of classic MS-DOS games that could all be played through your browser thanks to the DOSBox emulator. Now it turns out those same games can be easily directly embedded into tweets and played from just about anywhere.

Using the newly discovered feature is easy. All you have to do is copy the game URL from the Internet Archive Software Library for MS-DOS games and paste it directly into your tweet. You can then run the game through on Twitter, or you can embed the tweet on another site and play it there.

Carmen San Diego

The Internet Archive is a non-profit dedicated to “working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — and other ‘born-digital’ materials from disappearing into the past.” The organization preserves millions of videos, audio files, text documents, computer programs and more. This includes hundreds of classic video games like Oregon TrailWolfenstein 3D and Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego?

Here is an example of an embedded tweet with a fully functioning version of Oregon Trail. The games work on the web and through the TweetDeck client, but it does not look like they currently work on mobile.

Embedded video games is likely not a feature Twitter planned on supporting, but with the company’s abysmal stock performance this week, it might be the perfect time to take advantage of something new and different.

Of course, knowing Twitter, the company may suddenly decide to shut down the functionality for the Internet Archive and try to put out its own less successful version.

 

Screenshot via Archive.org

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