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Home / News / Send DOS games via Twitter and usher in the workpocalypse

Send DOS games via Twitter and usher in the workpocalypse

Ruin productivity by tweeting your friends Football Manager, Prince of Persia, and Speedball 2

If you want any more proof that we’re living in the future, it turns out you can now embed entire DOS games in tweets.

The games remain fully playable, which will almost certainly break the brains of anyone over the age of 30, who will remember the times when you needed a computer about the size of a hatchback to play them.

DOSsing about

The clever technology bit appears to be a combination of Twitter’s seeming desire to enable users to embed every kind of content, ever, within tweets, and Internet Archive’s efforts to make thousands of DOS games playable in a web browser. And as this lovely slice of proof shows, embedding these games is simply a case of including the relevant Internet Archive DOS URL in a tweet.

OK, so let’s test this thing: the original Football Manager, playable in a tweet… https://t.co/t4SunZSFaa

Yes, that is the original Football Manager, by Kevin Toms, embedded in a tweet, which itself is embedded inside this very article. Mad.

Earlier this year, we outlined ten (well, eleven, because we cheated a bit) of the best DOS games to play in the browser; now you can use them to utterly destroy any vestige of your friends’ productivity, merely by tweeting URLs at them. Alternatively, fire up the trolling cannon a bit, by…

Providing a helping link to Football Manager for clubs that could clearly do with a new one:

@mcfc @lfc https://archive.org/details/msdos_Football_Manager_1982

Or pointing the Hobbit movie account towards an interactive version of the story that actually stayed true to the original, despite fitting into about 48k and not costing hundreds of millions of dollars to produce:

@thehobbitmovie https://archive.org/details/msdos_Hobbit_The_1983

Mostly, though, we’re going to be spending the rest of the day trying to wrestle Aldershot out of the fourth division, all from inside a tweet, simultaneously getting misty-eyed about great old games and how far technology’s evolved in the last 32 years. Oh, and blame Wired for all those lost work hours, since they spotted this oddity first.

Profile image of Craig Grannell Craig Grannell Contributor

About

I’m a regular contributor to Stuff magazine and Stuff.tv, covering apps, games, Apple kit, Android, Lego, retro gaming and other interesting oddities. I also pen opinion pieces when the editor lets me, getting all serious about accessibility and predicting when sentient AI smart cookware will take over the world, in a terrifying mix of Bake Off and Terminator.

Areas of expertise

Mobile apps and games, Macs, iOS and tvOS devices, Android, retro games, crowdfunding, design, how to fight off an enraged smart saucepan with a massive stick.

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