Update: You can no longer play games in tweets, as Twitter seems to have disabled the Internet Archive’s Player embed functionality a few days after this story ran. Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
Original Story: The Internet Archive has made a priority of sharing and archiving huge numbers of classic video games and other software on its website, something we’ve reported on before. But now the organization has taken things a step further: You can now embed playable classic games directly in tweets, as you can see below.
“Older software is hard to get to,” said Internet Archive archivist Jason Scott in his 2015 GDC talk. We believe that access drives preservation.”
The legality, however, of including these old games — still under copyright protection and many of them active commercial properties for the companies that hold those rights — has been called into question.
While it is unclear if the archive has the rights to share these games at all, it can’t be denied that this move can only make classic games more visible and accessible in new places.
For more on The Internet Archive’s view on software preservation and its archives, visit its site.