Before it became overrun with AI slop and bots, the Internet was the good kind of wild frontier, brimming with jokes and otherwise lost content. Well, the Internet is still that, there’s just a lot more trash to wade through to find the good stuff.
One website that provides “the good stuff” is RetroGames.cz, which makes possible the playing of some classic games via emulation in your browser. I spent a good chunk of time last year playing through the old Dragon Warrior game; eventually, I’ll get around to loading up my save state and finishing it. It’s the grindiest RPG I’ve ever played!
Occasionally, I find myself nostalgic for the rudimentary, homemade websites of the late 1990s and early 2000s, wherein website design philosophy consisted of cramming as many animated GIFs onto the homepage as possible, and everything was typed in Times New Roman font. The formality of the font contrasted with the frivolity of the overall design, to the effect that webpages in those days were akin to early digital folk art. The amateurism—which, it must be remembered, still required a good bit of working knowledge of HTML and JavaScript at the time—leant those websites a certain charm, even if that whimsical form came at the expense of function.
Well, enough of my waxing artistical. Go play some good games.
With that, here is 4 June 2025’s “Retro Games Website“:
Yours portly has been playing excessive amounts of Colonization lately (my latest game, as the Dutch, ended in disaster when my New York-based colonies fell to the Stadtholder’s forces in a doomed war of independence), and writing about and thinking about old games has sent me down a rabbit hole. Regular reader and contributor Ponty got me searching down an old Lord of the Rings game; while I didn’t find it, I did find RetroGames.cz.
RetroGames.cz bills itself as the “ONLINE Museum of Old Video Games,” and the designation is apt. According to the website, its goal is “to keep alive the games of the 1980s and 1990s, which were created for consoles and systems that can no longer be purchased and are no longer supported by its developers and manufacturers.” It does so through the emulation of games, which can be played directly in your browser.
For example, the site includes the (in?)famous Castlevania’s II: Simon’s Quest for Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I’m pretty sure one of my brother’s has that game, but why not play it from the comfort of your computer?
As I mentioned, I could not find the LotR game I had in mind, but I did find 1990’s The Lord of the Rings, Volume I, a top-down roleplaying game that created a massive world for the Fellowship to explore, complete with numerous side quests and a map that apparently allows players huge amounts of freedom to veer from the path taken in the novels. I played a few minutes of it this weekend—not even long enough to get out of the Shire, but long enough to get a sense for the game’s most basic mechanics—and it would be great to see a modern RPG set in the LotR universe with that kind of openness and freedom.
The website itself looks like it was built in the 1990s (it even has a guestbook—remember those?). As someone who remembers the Internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s, I possess my generation’s weakness for nostalgia, and that includes nostalgia for the homemade web design of my teenage and college years.
In total, there are 1811 games on the site, so there’s a rich library of beloved classics (and probably some games that might deserve to be forgotten). If you’re into old games, check it out!