Have you ever walked into an octogenarian's house that has been in the same family for over a generation? You immediately notice furniture, wallpaper, carpet, and appliances from a different era. While styles and fashions changed, the house's occupant stuck with what was most comfortable, inadvertently creating a time capsule of the past.

There's a digital equivalent to this effect in the world of Internet gaming. If you dig a little, you can uncover an almost secret undercurrent of online games, no longer trendy in style or fashion, that persist beneath the vibrant and ever-changing forefront of the Internet. They persist mostly because the Internet's oldest generation finds comfort and nostalgia in their existence, but sometimes these games hang on merely because their owners forgot they were there, still running on a lonely machine tucked away in a dusty back room.

Most of these "forgotten" gamesforgotten by the mainstream, anywayare only accessible via telnet, which is a text-only means of connecting two computers over the Internet. To use telnet on a modern PC, you usually need a telnet clienta program that emulates a text-based terminal and serves to connect your machine to a remote one.

For Windows, the author recommends PuTTY, although Windows' built-in telnet program (accessible via the command prompt) will work in a pinch. For Mac OS X, open up telnet "Terminal" application and type "telnet" at the prompt followed by the address you wish to connect to. The same is true of Linux via a command console.

With that out of the way, let's grab our brass lanterns and start digging.