Ancient Web: Mad Martian Kept Its 1980s DOS Adventure Alive

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Mad Martian calls itself a museum, but its collections include an eyeball gift shop, an alarming toilet, a broccoli character, and a game in which a tyrant from Mars would like to dispose of humanity.

Visit the Mad Martian Museum of Modern Madness.

The surviving homepage is a collage of images and links labeled with exhibit titles. Its footer gives a copyright range of 1995–2018. Visitors can wander into an Eyeball Museum, Broccoli Man, a Halloween page, music history, food experiments, and a section titled Your Brain. The menu does not try particularly hard to convince newcomers that the subjects belong together. That is part of its appeal.

Several older exhibit links were not retrievable during this review, so their names are evidence of the site's navigation, not a claim that every interactive attraction still functions.

A game from before the museum had a website

The most substantial surviving section is Pitiful Humans! You Must Die!. Its page describes a DOS text adventure in the tradition of Infocom, accepting English sentences and abbreviated commands. The premise is that an absurd Martian dictator has imprisoned thousands of humans beneath Mars. The player is taken from the cell into a cavern where an ominous laugh announces that things have not improved.

The game page carries a 1985–2001 copyright statement and a note about a 2011 update offering DOSBox instructions for users of newer computers. It still asks satisfied players to send the author five dollars as shareware payment. That mix of old commercial habit and emulator-era adaptation is a time capsule of independent game distribution.

The site's main navigation also lists a mouse-click competition and linked collections of unusual digital art, cartoony visual jokes, and homemade projects. It remembers an Internet where a solo creator could string together several tiny interactive entertainments without hosting them on a unified games platform.

No claim of broad popularity is necessary here. The evidence is that an odd personal project with roots in older home-computer culture remains available through its original, wonderfully uncompromising website.

Explore the site's odd exhibits or read about the DOS adventure.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.