As part of its continuing mission to catalog and preserve our shared digital history, the Internet Archive has published a collection of more than 900 classic arcade games, playable directly in a Web browser via a Javascript emulator.
The Internet Arcade collects a wide selection of titles, both well-known and obscure, ranging from "bronze age" black-and-white classics like 1976's Sprint 2 up through the dawn of the early '90s fighting game boom in Street Fighter II. In the middle are a few historical oddities, such as foreign Donkey Kong bootleg Crazy Kong and the hacked "Pauline Edition" of Donkey Kong that was created by a doting father just last year.
The site's new arcade offerings are the work of curator Jason Scott, who has previously archived thousands of classic console and PC games as part of the Internet Archive's software collection. Like that previous work, the Arcade collection is built on top of JSMESS, a version of the open-source Multi Emulator Super System project designed to run in Javascript-compatible browsers. Adding MAME-based arcade game support to the Internet Archive's JSMESS environment "turned out to be easy. Very, very easy," Scott writes on his personal blog.