At the end of April, elderly gamers felt a brief flutter of excitement across their desiccated loins. Over 2500 games from the Internet Archive's Software Library could now not only be played using browser emulation, but could be embedded and played in tweets.In technical terms, it was a pretty staggering achievement. While the modern console industry continues to cautiously dip a toe in the warm bath of streaming gameplay, enthusiasts had shown that older games could be shared and played - lock, stock and pixels - instantly on social media. No installation, no download required. It was too good to be true. "That won't last," I told myself and, for once, I was right. The very next day after the story broke, Twitter dropped the axe on it.
What surprised me, however, was the reason. Twitter shut the tweetable MS-DOS classics down because embedding "end-to-end interactive experiences" into a tweet is against their terms of service. The potential for hacker mischief is clearly unacceptable.
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