MS-DOS gameplay in tweets has been disabled for violating Twitter rules

The Internet buzzed with excitement yesterday when news emerged that you could embed and play video games from the Internet Archive’s MS-DOS library directly in your tweets. Today, it looks like the party’s over, because at some point in the past 24 hours, Twitter switched off the capability to do so.

Indeed, all you see now is a link to the game on the Internet Archive’s website, with no interactivity inside the tweet itself.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1715923,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,media,social,","session":"A"}']

https://twitter.com/psawers/status/593721099730460672

While it’s not exactly clear when support was originally activated, letting anyone play Pac-Man, Prince of Persia, SimCity and thousands of other games in their Twitter feed, that it has been deactivated so soon after the news emerged is notable.

Indeed, we can confirm that the reason it was switched off is because it violated Twitter’s Card Rules, which govern how developers can and can’t use rich media content within tweets. According to Twitter’s rules of engagement, developers are warned:

“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. Instead, build these interactive experiences with our other Card types or enhance your Player Card content with links to your website or mobile application.”

You can still play all the games on the Internet Archive’s own website, and you can still embed and play these across the Web, so this is hardly the end of the world. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

And to ease the pain, have a game of Tetris on us.