In times of crisis, there’s comfort to be found in nostalgia.

As the world turns inward to fight the spread of COVID-19, the supply chain for distraction is well secured and seemingly limitless — especially online, where you can play an old classic like Oregon Trail, introduce your children to the strange edutainment of your youth, or soothe yourself with cereal commercials from 1985.

“Sometimes people frame it that it’s not healthy to dwell in the past,” says Ed Conroy of Retrontario. “It absolutely is not, but it is very healthy to revel in the things from the past that made you happy.”

On his website, Conroy shares forgotten bits of Ontario pop culture history, including children’s programming, workout videos, and jingles you haven’t heard for 35 years but can still remember all the words to.

With more people isolating at home, he has already seen a significant increase in engagement. He considers nostalgia “chicken soup for the soul,” and these days, he’s receiving requests for more.

Mostly, the emails are from parents looking for the shows they grew up with to share with their children, like “Polka Dot Door,” “Dear Aunt Agnes” and “Romper Room.”

Conroy says that arcane Canadian copyright means that many of these old shows are almost entirely absent from streaming services and home video. So he has made it his mission to make them accessible once more.

Nostalgia hits everybody differently. It might be an obscure local cable show you watched when you were home sick, or it could be a meal your grandmother used to make. In times of crisis, returning to these slivers of the past can help restore your self-identity and make you feel a bit better by helping you find something you’re missing, says David Berry, author of the upcoming “On Nostalgia,” a book that explores the cultural history of nostalgia, and what it means to remember.

In that sense, nostalgia can be a way to solve a problem, he says. If you’re feeling lonely, you might yearn for a time when you were surrounded by friends. As the world faces uncertainty, it follows that people might look to the past for very specific things. “Nostalgia is always about our present,” Berry says. “It’s never about what we’re returning to.”

In the 17th century, Berry explains, nostalgia was considered a disease — and one that afflicted mercenaries and soldiers in particular. A scared 17-year-old soldier who only wanted to think of home instead of fighting would very likely be considered a victim of the affliction. People didn’t realize that sentimental yearning was a reaction to distress, and not the cause of it, he says.

By the late 19th century, nostalgia became a disposition tied to the alienation of modern life, and the idea that people wanted to return to a comfortable safe place, Berry says. As people began to travel more in the 20th century, nostalgia became a metaphor for a specific era or time. By the 1970s, it went mainstream and commercial, with specialty shops and publications that satisfied a certain wistfulness.

Nostalgia has only grown more accessible in the modern era, where it exists on-demand online. Society is all in, whether it’s Hollywood remaking the classics or people stuck at home during a pandemic, diving into a virtual treasure trove for a temporary escape.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library that provides access to an overwhelming array of pop culture artifacts. You can watch endless films, listen to a 1974 recording of the Grateful Dead’s show at the Portland Memorial Coliseum, or play video games from your childhood.

All eras are well-represented. They have the black and white games from the 1970s, arcade games, MS-DOS games and off-brand hand-helds, among others. They even have the Tamagotchi from the late 1990s, although, fair warning — it’s not as fun to raise a pixelated blob without the plastic egg in your hand.

“People wander in and it looks like the world’s most insane pawnshop,” says the Internet Archive’s software curator Jason Scott from his home in upstate New York. “They don’t know where to start.” Part of his job is pointing people in the right direction by creating categories and subcollections.

Scott joined the Internet Archive in 2011. At that point, the software was unplayable online. Scott and a team of volunteers went to work to figure out how they’d bring the games back to life on an internet browser.

Most were made by long-defunct companies, or people who were no longer involved in software. He and his team used a series of emulators to make the “aggressively old and decrepit” games work. They had a few games working by 2013 and added more every few months.

There are now about 7,000 professional games in their MS-DOS collection, and Scott considers 1,000 of them to be really “top notch,” — classics like Sim City, Wing Commander and ZZT.

The Internet Archive doesn’t discriminate. They have blockbusters, educational games, also-rans, flash in the pan knock-offs, games that were forgotten or presumed gone forever.

“All I wanted was for an entire range and family of games and programs to become part of the contemporary reference and conversation in the same way we still talk about a Dean Koontz book or J.K. Rowling,” Scott says.

Scott thinks that the old games are appealing because they give people a measure of control. MS-DOS games in particular were tightly designed. If you understand the rules, it may get complicated, but the universe makes sense. “I think that’s a very appealing thing to people.”

Playing a text-based game like Oregon Trail, or Crosscountry Canada, both educational staples for generations of students, can be a nice distraction. In Crosscountry Canada, you’re on a long haul mission to pick up and deliver commodities across the country.

When I fired it up, a jaunty theme song played as a Canadian flag waved across the pixelated cerulean sky. I had not seen that particular view for 25 years, but it didn’t matter. It took me right back to the computer lab of my elementary school.

DRIVE SOUTH, I typed. THE TRUCK IS NOT TURNED ON, it replied. I was marooned in Prince Edward Island to start the game, and no matter what direction of travel I typed, by ferry and road, none of my commands worked. I radioed for help, but the tow truck driver found nothing wrong.

SLEEP, I typed. YOU TOSS AND TURN AND ARE UNABLE TO SLEEP, it replied.

I had gone back to the early 1990s to find myself restless and alone. I didn’t mind.

There are dangers in dwelling in yesterday. We all know someone, says Berry, who is a little too obsessed with trying to recapture the past. But the difference between medicine and poison, he explains from his home in Edmonton, is the dosage.

Nostalgia can be criticized for its tendency to romanticize the past, while forgetting the negative parts. People might not necessarily remember the frustration of the old computer games — how you could be marooned on P.E.I. with no instructions, how you had to write a letter or call a 1-800 number for tech support, or how your computer might not even have the right sound, graphics or memory to play in the first place.

It’s a valid criticism, Berry says, but it tends to overlook the idea that nostalgia is trying to solve a problem. If you’re scouring the Internet Archive, seeking out a quick game of city building with Sim City, maybe you’re taking yourself back to a time when you weren’t scared of mounting global death tolls, ventilator shortages, and the societal and personal implications of a pandemic.

“That’s what you’re trying to solve,” says Berry.

Morgan Cameron Ross curates the Old Toronto, Old Ontario and Old Canada social media accounts, where he shares historical photos and videos. He says that people seem very focused on the actual news about COVID-19 at the moment, but he anticipates there will soon be more need for distraction.

He plans to hunker down and produce more videos and post content on the site that might cheer people up or make people curious to learn more about their city, province and country. It will help him too, he says.

Ross knows that people especially love the photos that take them back to their childhood, whether it’s Christmas toys from a certain year or McDonald’s Happy Meal toys.

The power of the image depends on where you grew up, and how old you are. His top nostalgia post is a photo of a 24-pack of Laurentian pencil crayons. When he posted it last November, people responded with affection and delight for the familiar back to school staple. (He did, too.)

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“It’s amazing how powerful nostalgia can be,” he writes in an email. “It can be a real shock to a person’s system. Often in a very nice way.”

Ed Conroy of Retrontario has already seen increases in site visits, and he expects the appetite for nostalgia will only grow. He’s trying to focus on lighthearted fare, like children’s programming. “Anything that makes people smile,” he says.

Conroy has been rescuing ephemeral bits of pop culture — and the playback technology needed to access them since the early 2000s. He was worried about what would happen to the analog treasures in a digital world.

When social media and YouTube came along, he began to share his weird and wonderful finds. Often, people who worked on the shows comment on social media to provide insight. On Facebook and YouTube, you can sometimes find “a mini oral history in the comment section,” he says.

Conroy runs this site as a non-profit and works with copyright holders to digitize their material from antiquated formats.

“It’s a way to exhibit educational content for historical reasons, he says.

As daily life drastically changed in the past week, the two most popular videos on Retrontario are a compilation of cereal commercials from 1985, and an episode of “Barbapapa,” a children’s television show that ran on TVO in 1982.

The latest comment on Barbapapa came two weeks ago, six days before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic: “I just cried seeing this after 40 plus years.”

The places nostalgia takes us are deeply personal, and one of the strange quirks is that sometimes, we’re drawn to times of upheaval.

David Berry points to Britain, where there has always been a focus on the blitz, and the way Britons kept calm and carried on in spite of the death and destruction that surrounded them during the Second World War.

Important events can’t help but shape us, he says. Despite the fact that we are facing a terrible situation with inevitable death, Berry thinks it is likely that we will one day be nostalgic for the positive aspects of this moment in time, how people came together (in social isolation) and looked out for each other. This will be formative. It will change how people think of themselves, and that ultimately causes nostalgia.

“As weird as it seems now,” he says. “One day we will look back on this and think about how wonderful some aspect of this is, which is absurd. But that’s people for you.”

Ed Conroy’s Top 5 Retrontario nostalgic videos to zen out with in a crisis:

5. 20 Minute Workout

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Fantastic retro vibes and still an effective workout.

4. The Eaton Centre My City My Centre

Fashion centre of Toronto, circa summer 1984

A truly radical ’80s celebration of the Eaton Centre.

3. Night Ride

Here's some more smooth sailing late night style from Global TV crica 1986. This clip has a nice drive around downtown T.O, including another buzz by Sam the Record Man and the legendary A&As.

Late night, jazz-fuelled cruise of Yonge Street circa 1986.

2. Hammy Hamster’s Adventures on the Riverbank

Here it is - a bonafide Holy Grail, very kindly donated to Retrontario by Mark Ehmcke. From an off-air, early morning 1982 Global TV broadcast, original commercials present and correct. This was shot in 1972, but ran on an endless loop in the early 80s. That theme!

The Canadian “dubbed” version of Hammy remains perhaps the most serene children’s TV show ever.

1. Citytv Sign-off — “People City”

Good night, and good morning.

Toronto’s true lullaby used to sign-off Citytv’s broadcast days remains a potent reminder of who we are.

Internet Archive Curator Jason Scott’s picks for best MS-DOS games:

PAKU PAKU is one of my favourite Pac-Man clones we have — it was written for a contest and he made it so smooth and easy to play that if someone likes Pac-Man they’ll love this.

Battle Chess is chess ... but the pieces are all animated and they attack each other in sometimes hilarious ways.

Digger — an old classic. Arrow keys to move, and I owned this game for a year before I found out pressing F1 makes the little guy fire!

Who can resist the classic, Adventure, as it was presented in 1981 on the PC?

By 1992, Tetris was really played out, so the companies who still put out Tetris made them REALLY graphically complicated and full of music.