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download onlyTetris1985MS-DOS / PC
info onlyPrehistorik 21993MS-DOS / PC
▶Arkanoid1988MS-DOS / PC
▶Dangerous Dave1990MS-DOS / PC
▶Supaplex1991MS-DOS / PC
▶Skyroads1993MS-DOS / PC
▶Sokoban1984MS-DOS / PC
▶Paratrooper1982MS-DOS / PC
▶Vlak1993MS-DOS / PC
The childhood games gathered here are sixteen MS-DOS titles, and all sixteen start directly in your browser. Nothing installs, no plugin is needed and there is no account to create — you open a game's page and the emulator runs inside it. This is a curated list, not a search result, which is why it is short and why every entry earned its place.
The obvious openers are Prince of Persia (1990, Brøderbund) with its rotoscoped run-and-jump animation, Lemmings (1991, Psygnosis) and Tetris (1985), written in Moscow by Alexey Pajitnov. Next to them sit the arcade conversions everyone met on a home PC rather than in an arcade: Pac-Man (1980) in its Atarisoft PC port, Arkanoid (1988, Taito) and Bomberman (1992).
The ones that spread on floppies
A second group is made of games that travelled by copied diskette and school computer rooms rather than by shop shelves. Prehistorik (1991) and Prehistorik 2 (1993) came from the French studio Titus Interactive and became far more famous in Central Europe than at home. Dangerous Dave (1990) was written by John Romero at Softdisk, the company where he was working alongside John Carmack before Doom existed. Supaplex (1991) reworks Boulder Dash into a world of floppy disks and creatures living inside a computer, and SkyRoads (1993) came from the Estonian team Bluemoon as a successor to their earlier Kosmonaut.
The rest fills in the corners: Golden Axe (1990) for side-scrolling swordplay, Stunts (1990) for loop-the-loop racing with a track editor, Sokoban (1984) and Paratrooper (1982) for the pure early-PC feel, and Vlak (1993), a Czech snake-style puzzle game by Miroslav Němeček published by Gemtree Software — a local classic the rest of the world never met.
If you are now picking games for your own children, the gentler end of this era lives on the kids games shelf — Putt-Putt, Reader Rabbit and nothing that bites. And if your childhood had a moustachioed plumber in it, the mario games page gathers the whole dynasty, Super Mario Bros. included, playable right in the browser.