JogoBox, though still in beta, is a polished and well-designed Windows PC app that lets you play all sorts of freeware games be they indie, flash, casual or even retro for, err, free. It's quite a bit the Steam-clone like Tiggit only better looking and less open source. Also, and as I just mentioned (you weren't paying attention, were you?), it does actually play older DOS games via dosbox and flash games without any glitches whatsoever, and even though the way those games are categorized does border on odd, I must admit I'm loving the interface and, frankly, the selection of games already on the service.
Hit the jump for a short interview with Renate Geven; one of the creators of JogoBox:
1. Why did you actually create JogoBox? What were your main goals?
We wanted to bring the old retro games alive. We noticed that there is a need for eighties and nineties games, but installing these games could be hard for people with a lack of technical knowledge. With JogoBox we want to give these people the opportunity to play their retrogames with one mouseclick.
There exist a lot of quality indie games, but due to the fragmentation of the market a larger group does not get in contact with indie games. For these games we want to offer (via JogoBox) a place where all of them are brought together.
The main goal is ease of use and we want to reach this by: no registration, no difficult installations, a clear and organized overview of the thousands of games with a simple search system.
2. How do you see it evolving?
We find it really important that JogoBox is easy to use, we don't want to have a (difficult) registration part or difficult installations. We want to have an open platform with free games that can be played by 1 mouseclick. We want to expand JogoBox by adding more indiegames and retro games to the platform (besides the flash games). Besides this, we want to collaborate with more developers in the future.
3. How did you secure the rights to such games as Lost Vikings, Golden Axe and Civilization?
With JogoBox we try to focus on freeware and abandonware games. In most cases we contact the developers to ask their permission to distribute their game. In most cases, their response is positive because they see JogoBox as an extra platform to distribute their game on.
