This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Faster than Ryu KOing Ken, Twitter has killed off the ability to play MS-Dos games in tweets.



Just last week, users discovered they could take advantage of Twitter’s embedding feature to turn links to the Internet Archive’s 2,600 strong collection of emulated MS-Dos games into playable widgets on the micro-blogging platform. They used the same system – called Twitter Cards – which allows videos, images and other rich media to be displayed in-line in Twitter’s stream. The same system also displays ads.

But embedding interactive media, and specifically games, within Twitter Cards is against the social network’s terms of service.

Listed under “what the approval team looks for” in its developer documentation for cards, Twitter states: “Do not build end-to-end interactive experiences inside the video or audio player unrelated to Player Card content, such as the following: purchasing, gaming, polling, messaging, and data entry.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Once there was a game, now there is just a link. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

And so Twitter has now disabled the feature, likely after seeing the various news reports and a stream of Street Fighter II, Wolfenstein 3D and Zool littering people’s timelines.

It’s game over on Twitter, but you can still visit the Internet Archive directly to get your 1980s gaming fix. Or play here.