I am a huge fan of the Internet Archive and their mission to be a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Today on my internet travels, I discovered that they have a collection of Shareware programs for the Windows 3.0/3.1/3.1.1 systems of the early 1990s, many of which are actually PLAYABLE using an emulator, directly on Internet Archive.

My favourites that still stick in my mind:

• Solitaire: I don’t want to think about how many hours I spent playing this.
• Minesweeper: Minesweeper is a puzzle game in which the player is presented with a board filled with mines, without knowing what fields they occupy.
• Super Mario Brothers: I fear that I still play this on an old Nintendo DS Lite…
• Bricks: a single player, single screen, breakout clone with no sound, no scoring, and no special features. The player has three lives with which to clear the bricks on the screen.
• SimCity: funnily, I never managed to get into the subsequent editions.
• Mahjong: I think that I may have been inspired to try this after reading The Adventures of Tintin, once upon a time…