Back in 2019, while most gaming platforms raced toward photorealistic graphics and virtual reality, these folks decided to build something different. They made a home for our old friends, the games that shaped us.

The platform now hosts over 1,300 retro games, streaming them directly through the cloud. Gone are the days of blowing into cartridges or listening to that distinct Commodore 64 disk drive sound. Instead, you pick a game and play. Simple as that.

The library feels like walking through a perfectly preserved arcade from 1985. Pac-Man's there, chomping away next to Space Invaders and Galaga. They've got the home console hits too - games from the Atari 2600, NES, and Sega Genesis. Even the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 classics made it in.

The Antstream team added modern touches to these vintage games. They created over 600 mini-game challenges and weekly tournaments. The global leaderboards remind me of crowding around arcade cabinets, except now you're competing with players worldwide instead of just the local champions.

You can fire up these games on pretty much anything with a screen - phones, tablets, web browsers, even some smart TVs. It feels strange playing Spectrum games on a phone, but somehow it works. The technology does its job and gets out of the way, letting the games speak for themselves.

The platform built a genuine community around these classics. Players share their achievements and compete in tournaments, keeping these old games alive in a new context. It's like finding your old gaming buddies again, except now they're spread across the globe.

Sure, something gets lost in translation. The weight of a joystick, the click of a keyboard, the warmth of a CRT - those physical sensations stay in the past. But Antstream preserves something more important: the games themselves, the challenge, the fun.

For those of us who grew up in arcades and computer shops, Antstream Arcade does more than stream old games. It keeps a piece of gaming history alive, making sure these classics stick around for another generation to discover. Whether that's worth the trade-off of physical media is up to you, but I'm glad someone's keeping the lights on.