Living-room console

The eight-bit console is where a lot of people first drove a character around a screen. Its games share a hard set of constraints: one screen or one scrolling lane, two action buttons, and no save, so the rules had to land in seconds and the difficulty had to come from level design instead. That is what gives the era its feel — crisp collisions, instant failure, and a restart that costs one button. We rebuild the pacing, not the pictures: characters, levels, music and palettes here are all our own.

What kinds of games were on eight-bit consoles?

Mostly side-scrolling adventures, armour duels, trap-filled mine crawls and ring fighting. They share two action buttons, a short run, and an instant restart, so the rules stay simple while the levels carry the difficulty.

Can you still play those television games in a browser?

You can play the same mechanics, but not the same files. Every game here is a fresh implementation of the core loop as a web page, so it runs the moment you open it — no emulator and no game file involved.

Why can I not find the original titles by name?

Those names, characters and artwork are other people's trademarks and copyrighted work, and we do not use them. What we use are descriptive names for the mechanics, which is an easier way to recognise a game you half remember anyway.