About

These are games made after the browser games I used to enjoy playing back in the day — Flash, Shockwave, Java applets, DHTML, roughly 1998 to 2012 — written from scratch so they run on a modern browser without a plugin.

Not reproductions

None of these is a copy, and none of them is trying to be. Ruffle emulates Flash and does it well; if you want the original, play the original. This is the other thing: the game as I remember it, made again by someone who loved it, with the parts that only hurt taken out and the parts worth remembering kept.

Saying that plainly matters. A remake that claims to be faithful and quietly is not is worse than one that admits up front it is a new take — and the new take is the more interesting thing to build, because it is allowed to decide things.

Two ways to play

Most games here run in one of two modes. Classic keeps the constraints the original worked under: its stage size, its limits, its refusal to save your progress, its difficulty where that difficulty was chosen rather than imposed by the hardware of the day. Modern is the version you wished you’d had — widescreen, saves, remappable controls, a pause that actually pauses.

Classic does not pretend to be the original. What it promises is narrower and true: it respects what the original made you live with. Every difference between the two is listed on the game’s own page, along with anything I guessed at.

How they are made

Every game is written from scratch. No original code, art, audio, level data or names are used, and nothing is decompiled, extracted or traced. Most of what you see is generated by code as the game runs — sprites drawn to a canvas at boot, sounds synthesised as they play. That started as a constraint and turned out to be the interesting part; where a game genuinely needs authored artwork, it will get its own, made for it.

Credit

Every game names the one that inspired it, its author and its year, along with what the research could not settle. That is not a disclaimer — it is half the work, and the part I enjoy most. Mechanics, rules and systems are ideas, and ideas are what these games taught me; a particular expression of them is somebody’s work, and that is written fresh here.

If you made one of the originals and something is wrong — a date, a name, an attribution, or a mechanic I have plainly misremembered — I would like to hear about it: hello@ashleybradley.co.uk.