Definitely possible, but I think WordPad in Windows 95 was written from scratch.
You don't have to use a third-party short URL service. It can be hosted on your own site.
A lot of people are already using a third-party short URL service like qrco.de because they don't realise you don't actually need a service like that to make a QR code.
WordPad didn't exist until Windows 95. You might be thinking of Microsoft Write, which predated it.
WordPad in Windows 95 was a demonstration of how to use the rich-text editing component built into Windows. Its C++ source code came bundled with MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes - programming library for making Windows apps using C++) as a sample.
The fact that it was a useful tool for end users was essentially just a side effect.
or the url has a ton of tracking params appended to it for some reason
Ideally you should use a short URL that redirects to the full URL. The tracking parameters should be on the long URL, not the short one.
Nintendo could try make up something like "it's not computer software since the Switch is a console, not a computer" or something like that. Not a great argument, but they have good lawyers and could probably convince a court that it's true.
A VPS still counts as self-hosting :)
I host my sites on a VPS. Better internet connection and uptime, and you can get pretty good VPSes for less than $40/year.
The approach I'd take these days is to use a static site generator like Eleventy, Hugo, etc. These generate static HTML files. You can then store those files on literally any host. You can stick them on a VPS and serve them with any web server. You could upload them to a static file hosting service like BunnyCDN storage, Github Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, etc. Even Amazon S3 and Cloudfront if you want to pay more for the same thing. Note that Github Pages is extremely feature-poor so I'd usually recommend one of the others.
And how many of the carjackings were high-value targets like delivery vans, or in sketchy high-crime parts of the city.
Was there a Linux version?
it's legal to dump that game to a PC and play it on a Switch emulator, right?
Depends on where you live. Copyright law varies significantly from country to country.
In the USA, section 117 of the copyright act lets you create a copy for archival/backup purposes only. What I'm unsure about (and don't know if there's any relevant caselaw) is whether bypassing copy protection to create the copy violates the DMCA.
The equivalent Australian copyright law explicitly states that you can use the backup copy instead of the original one. The US law doesn't (all it says is that you can make an archival copy, not how you can use the archival copy), so it's a grey area.
Both laws are for "computer software", but you could easily argue that a video game is computer software.
Apple's stock wasn't growing a lot a decade ago when the FANG term was coined.
Other comments were talking about pros and cons of self-hosting, so I tried to give advice for both approaches. I probably could have been clearer about thay in my comment though. I edited the comment a bit to try and clarify.
I have some static sites that I just rsync to my VPS and serve using Nginx. That's definitely a good option.
If you want to make it faster by using a CDN and don't want it to be too hard to set up, you're going to have to use a CDN service.
Self-hosted CDN is doable, but way more effort. Anycast approach is to get your own IPv4 and IPv6 range, and get VPSes in multiple countries through a provider that allows BGP sessions (Vultr and HostHatch support this for example). Then you can have one IP that goes to the server that's closest to the viewer. Easier approach is to use Geo DNS where your DNS server returns a different IP depending on the visitor's location. You can self-host that using something like PowerDNS.