Why

Creating games is just as much fun as playing them. Ask anyone who spent longer building the level than finishing it.

Retro, because the old micro computers got something right. 64k of memory and a 1 MHz processor: simple enough to understand completely, hard enough that working inside those limits was the whole craft. The remarkable part was watching the quality climb year after year while the hardware stood still — all of it won by going down to machine code, before there was even an assembler, and pulling stunts like code that rewrites itself while it runs.

Now, in 2026, we have walked into the singularity. Hands-off coding will most likely just generate the binaries. So we are back in 1987, except that it is no longer me typing in the hex by hand — it is the AI. It will invent better tricks than we ever did. That does not take away from what was built back then, and it does not take away from the fun now.

Because the fun was never in the pixels. Pac-Man is still a chase. Lode Runner is still that moment where you dig the floor out from under someone and realise a second too late that you are standing on the wrong side of it. Neither of them cares that they are eight bits wide. Fidelity went up by a factor of a thousand; playability did not move much.

So: small screens, few colours, and everything spent on the part that actually matters.

How

These are small games, vibe coded — built by conversation with an AI, in the time that once went into the sprite routine alone.

Each one is filed under the machine it feels like it came from: MSX, C64, NES, SNES, Amiga, N64. Not emulation, and not a claim that any of them would have run on the real hardware. It is a note about register — how big the world is, how many colours it needs, how much the game is willing to explain to you.

Some are educational spin-offs, because a game is a very good disguise for practice. TOPO drills the Dutch provinces and the US states. MATH BLASTER makes arithmetic the ammunition. DRIFT has an Edu Mode where you ram the right answer and dodge the wrong ones. COSMOS is a solar system you fly through and are then quizzed on. The rule is that the game has to be worth playing even if you learn nothing — otherwise it is a worksheet with a soundtrack. CAT-MAN, PIPELINE and RUNEWEAVE teach you nothing at all, and that is fine too.

What

Play whatever you like. Everything in the arcade is open. No account, no charge — the coin slot is an invitation, not a paywall.

Request a game. Tell me what you would like to play: a mechanic you miss, a subject that would make a good disguise, an old 8-bit favourite worth reworking honestly. Requests land here and get made when they earn it.

Show what you can do. Beat the game, then beat your own run.

Share your score. High scores are not in yet — when they arrive they will work the way they should: three characters, no more. Pick them well. Half the art of the arcade was saying something in three letters while the machine hurried you along.

Background

I am Jasper. Teenage years on a Commodore 64, writing machine code and pushing the SID sound chip with arpeggios and white-noise drums; later 8-bit assembly on an XT, then MASM and TASM. The first time somebody else played something I had made is a moment I can still place.

That is what this is, decades on and with much better tools: the same trick, still worth doing.