Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser – Ars Technica
Red Alert<\/em>, Unreal Tournament<\/em>, and more.”,”image_url”:”https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/screen1c-500×500.jpg”,”listing_image_url”:”https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/screen1c-768×432.jpg”}”>
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Now with no port-forwarding!
There are fan-made browser versions of Red Alert, Unreal Tournament, and more.
A screenshot from Chrono Divide, a fan-made browser version of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2.
Credit:
Chrono Divide
A screenshot from Chrono Divide, a fan-made browser version of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2.
Credit:
Chrono Divide
Over the past couple of weeks, friends and colleagues have made me aware of multiple ingeniously implemented, browser-based ways to play classic MS-DOS and Windows games with other people on basically any hardware.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were the peak of multiplayer gaming for me. It was the era of real-time strategy games and boomer shooters, and not only did I attend many LAN parties, but I also played online with friends.
That’s still possible today with several old-school games; there are Discord servers that arrange scheduled matches of Starsiege Tribes, for example. But oftentimes, it’s not exactly trivial to get those games running in modern Windows, and as in the old days, you might have some annoying network configuration work ahead of you—to say nothing of the fact that many folks who were on Windows back in those days are now on macOS or Linux instead.
This week, several tech and gaming websites (starting with PC Gamer) have begun circulating a link to Chrono Divide, a fan-made browser version of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. It was first introduced in a nascent state back in 2020, but it has continued to receive updates, and it’s now pretty much feature- and content-complete as far as the multiplayer part of that game goes. (Single-player isn’t there yet.)
Here’s what the website says about it:
Chrono Divide is a fan-made project which aims to recreate the original “Red Alert 2” from the “Command & Conquer” series using web technologies. The result is a game client that runs in your web browser, with no additional plugins or applications installed.
The project initially started out as an experiment and was meant to prove that it was possible to have a fully working, cross-platform RTS game running in a web browser. Now, with a playable version already available, the end-goal is reaching feature parity with the original vanilla “Red Alert 2” engine.
It works with a client-server model (“say goodbye to port forwarding and firewall exceptions”), supports mods, offers both modern and classic mouse control schemes, and works “on any device and operating system, directly from your web browser,” including phones and tablets. You (understandably) have to have a copy of the game files to play, though.
Further, there are leaderboards and a Discord server, plus modern-game-style “seasons” (with no monetization, of course) that feature special rules and map rotations. So there’s a decent-sized community playing Red Alert 2 on the regular in 2025, which is pretty wild.
Chrono Divide joins a handful of similar projects in bringing older multiplayer PC games with modern bells and whistles to web browsers. One example: DOS Zone offers one-click joining of online matches of Doom, Quake 2 and 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life: Deathmatch—again, with a Discord server for an extra community layer.
So if you want to spend your Friday night reliving the TCP/IP and LAN party multiplayer games of the early 2000s, well, there you go. I’ll see you there—I still think Unreal Tournament is the best multiplayer first-person shooter ever made.
Samuel Axon
Senior Editor
Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.
