ScummVM: Gamin’ with the Oldies

You’re probably familiar with games like Sam & Max: The Devil’s Play House and Tales of Monkey Island, but only the old and nerdy among us remember the days of playing Sam & Max: Hit the Road and The Secret of Monkey Island with boot disks. (That’s right. We had to boot our computers from floppy disks to play a video game. I can’t wait to tell my grandkids about that nonsense.) For those of us with access to the original game files for these classic LucasArts adventure games, we’re in nostalgia heaven with ScummVM.

Instead of trying to trick your shiny new computer to run code written in the 80s and 90s, this is a little virtual machine app that makes the games think you’re running hardware from the 80s and 90s. You can now run these games seamlessly on pretty much any platform you can name. Don’t get too excited, though. If you want to run ScummVM on your iOS device, you’re going to need a *gasp* jailbreak. Playing it on your Mac or PC works wonderfully, though.

If you’re too young to have the original games, and you’re too moral to download them illegally, the ScummVM team has a handful of free supported games available right on their download page.

So, this is all really cool, right? Well, maybe you could look into donating to the ScummVM project over at SourceForge so that they can continue to update the app with more features and game support.

Grant is a writer from Delaware. In his spare time, Grant maintains a personal blog, hosts The Weekly Roar, hosts Quadcast, and writes for video games.