Old school gamers around the world rejoice! Once again you can play your favorite early console games in all their glory, and you don’t even have to dig through those dusty boxes in the family attic to get them. The Internet Archive, originally conceived to preserve webpages and short-lived internet articles, has expanded its library to include early home consoles and their games in its new archive, The Console Living Room. The best news? They’re all free.

By visiting the Internet Archive site, users can play games from the Atari 2600, Atari 7800 ProSystem, ColecoVision, Magnavox Odyssey² and the Astrocade, all within their internet browser. Yes, that’s correct, using only an internet browser you can now relive the epicness of favorite games such as Centipede, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, Q*Bert and Joust.

The available library of games is quite extensive, and gamers will be interested to know that more infamous titles are also available for play.

Those titles include Custer’s Revenge, a game where the goal is to dodge arrows in order to have sexual relations (assault) with a Native American woman, and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, a game so terrible it’s rumored that millions of unsold copies of the game were buried in a New Mexico landfill. The only downside to the archive is the lack of available in-game sound, although that is promised to be coming.

The Console Living Room is just another recent occurrence in acknowledging video games as an important part of human history and accomplishment. The Museum of Modern Art added seven more games to its video game design exhibition back in June, now including Asteroid, Pong, and Minecraft to name a few.

In a world of rapidly changing technology and increasingly short attention spans, services and archives such as these are becoming more important than ever, and will hopefully become more common in the years to come.

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Matt Nowatzke

Matt Nowatzke is a small-town farm boy who one day decided to use his book learning skills to leave the Midwest and see the world. After spending all his money in Europe, he cut his trip short and moved to Boston where he now writes for lunch money and teaches. In his spare time he enjoys reading, watching movies and cartoons, hiking, fishing, and attempting to make his own video games. You can find more about him on his blog or via Twitter.

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