Colophon · credits · house rules

The shelf

Three games that arrived without being chosen, each given the how-to-play manual it lost. The directory out front is built in the shape a 1996 web guide used, because that is the shape a list of things took before search made lists unnecessary.

What it is made of

Plain HTML and one stylesheet. No JavaScript — not as a restriction worked around, but because nothing here needs it: the navigation is links, the layout is a grid, and the artwork is CSS. The balloons on the Bow and Arrow page are pseudo-elements, the archer in its margin is inline SVG, the card backs on the Solitaire page are repeating gradients, and every tile in the Chip's Challenge legend and board is a styled div. The only bitmaps on the site are the three screenshots, and each is captioned and credited below.

Each page wears its own game's palette because colour is most of what survives in anybody's memory of these games: a green field, a green table, a grey tile floor. What you will not find is a recreation of any game's window. A title bar and a menu strip would make each page a picture of an old thing sitting inside a modern document; using the game's own materials as the page's furniture makes the era the page's skin instead.

Screenshot credits

Three screenshots are reproduced here for commentary and illustration. All rights remain with their respective rights holders; none of this artwork is ours.

• Bow and Arrow — level 1, Target Practice. Bow and Arrow 1.0, John Di Troia, 1992, running under Windows 3.1. Used on the Bow and Arrow page.
• Klondike layout, “SolMaire” — author unknown, unverified. The title bar of this capture reads SolMaire, and that name returns no results in the Internet Archive's Windows 3.1 shareware collection or Goodsol's index of Windows 3.1 solitaire programs. It is not Microsoft's Solitaire, and the Solitaire page says so where it appears.
• Chip's Challenge — board tiles as rendered by an emulator of the game. Chip's Challenge, Chuck Sommerville / Epyx, 1989. Used on the Chip's Challenge page.

What was deliberately left out

Fidelity to 1996 is not worth being unreadable in 2026. Four period habits are missing on purpose:

• Nothing blinks, scrolls or moves. <marquee> and <blink> are the two most recognisable tags of the era and both are absent, because motion a reader cannot stop is a barrier rather than a nostalgia trigger.
• Text is sized to be read, at a line length that stops before your eye loses the row. The period would have set this smaller and wider.
• There is a skip link and a visible keyboard focus style. Neither existed in 1996. Both are the price of admission now.
• There is no search box, though the reference layout puts one dead centre. Three pages do not need searching, and a box that only pretends to work is worse than an empty space that explains itself.

Sources

Every factual claim on the three manual pages is listed in that page's “Checked facts” box together with what it was checked against. The rules were taken from documentation rather than from memory, which matters more than it sounds: memory has been quietly rewriting these games for thirty years, and two claims that felt certain turned out to be wrong when checked.

• Solitaire — peterc.org's faithful browser recreation of Windows 3.1 Solitaire, for the menus, Options dialog and About box; Microsoft's Solitaire documentation as reproduced in Running Microsoft Windows; The Cutting Room Floor, for the cut boss key.
• Bow and Arrow — RGB Classic Games; the Internet Archive's copies of Bow and Arrow for Windows.
• Chip's Challenge — the Chip's Challenge Wiki at bitbusters.club; Microsoft Knowledge Base Q98909; Wikipedia.

If a claim on this site is not in one of those boxes, treat it as somebody's recollection rather than documentation. That distinction is the only thing separating an archive from a story about an archive.