If you’ve ever hankered to relive your childhood with a game of handheld Mortal Kombat by Tiger Electronics or Bandai’s Burger Time, you’re in luck.
The Internet Archive just launched a collection of 70 handheld games from the late 20th century that have been converted for online gaming, the Verge reported Monday. The archive includes Altered Beast, a mini tabletop version of the Parkers Brothers’ Q*Bert, and a long-forgotten handheld MC Hammer game—and more will be added soon.
The volunteers behind the project have worked for years to create an archive of emulated handheld games, archivist Jason Scott explained. When it comes to preserving the games, which sometimes includes physically deconstructing an original LCD game to extract data, they’ve carefully considered which ones are worth immortalizing on the internet and detailed the preservation techniques.
They also admit that playing a version of an LCD game in your browser isn’t exactly the same as playing on a plastic handheld.
“The plastic is such a major component of the experience that it may not be enough for some researchers and users to be handed a version of the visual output to really know what the game was like,” Scott writes.
Still, nostalgic gamers can itch any scratch to relive games like Konami’s Lone Ranger.
The Handheld History collection joins MS-DOS and classic console games from Atari and ColecoVision in the Internet Archive’s library.
H/T the Verge
