Twitter pulls support for classic video games playable in tweets

MS-Dos games, which were made available by the Internet Archive, are no longer playable within tweets because they break the terms of service

Pacman was just one of the games availably on the Internet Archive, and briefly on Twitter (Internet Archive)

Twitter has pulled a feature that allowed people to play classic video games from within tweets, just days after it was discovered.

Last week, joyous Twitter users found that linking to one of the Internet Archive’s trove of classic MS-Dos games meant that it showed as a “card”, in the same way that pictures and tweets do. That meant that games could be played within a tweet, just by expanding it.

But the feature has now been taken away. It was banned because allowing playable widgets and other interactive experiences is against Twitter’s terms of service, according to the Guardian.

The documentation for Twitter’s cards tells developers: “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.”

Internet Archive allows the games to be embedded anywhere else, which means they can be played from any website — including this one.

The full list of Internet Archive’s MS-Dos library is collected at its website.