Time-Wasting Heaven: Thousands Of Windows 3.1 Games Now Free
Last year the Internet Archive introduced a special playable section with thousands of abandonware games for ancient computers. Today they expanded their lineup significantly by adding Windows 3.1 games. As if that wasn’t enough, archive.org went into overkill by including nearly 300 utility and business apps, the majority of which would be useless today.
Lacking childhood experience with Windows 3.1 (every school I went to loved their Macs), I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s out there which is any good. There are quite a few big-budget games from major studios, but there are also a lot of primitive shareware titles programmed by one or two people. The image above was taken from the first game I saw, and it is Tic-Tac-Toe with bootleg Bart and Lisa heads in place of Xes and Os. I just saved you about two minutes, most of which would have been waiting for the emulator to load.
Speaking of the emulator, the games run on DosBOX, the most popular emulator for old DOS computer programs. Apparently it can function within browsers now, and there are no plug-ins required. If you’re planning to dig into the archive on company time, it’s important to point out that a handful of these games are NSFW, and when you search by “most popular” or “most views,” a lot of those NSFW games rise to the top. Of course, it could be argued that the entire site could get you fired anyway.
The Verge has a piece on what they consider to be the cream of this current crop. There is also a curated list on the site itself of what someone considers to be the best of Windows 3.1, including a demo for Windows 95 (it runs!)