About WASM Arcade

Real WebAssembly, not just a name

Our flagship titles are built in-house with game logic compiled to WebAssembly. In Snake, the entire grid — movement, body collisions, food spawning, scoring and the win condition — lives in a compact binary module that your browser executes at close to native speed. The same is true for the tile engine in 2048: sliding, merging, spawning and move validation all happen inside a WebAssembly module, while JavaScript only draws the screen and reads your keyboard.

That split is not a technical flex; it is the honest meaning of the “WASM” badge you will see on their cards. WebAssembly is the web standard that makes demanding software — game physics, emulation, video editing — feel instant in a browser tab. By compiling our own engines, we keep the promise in our name verifiable: view source, and you will find a real .wasm module doing the work, not a marketing word.

Where the HTML5 games come from

The rest of the collection is built on the MIT-licensed web-games collection by mashukui — thirty-plus single-file HTML5 games spanning arcade action, puzzles and tabletop classics. We reviewed the code before including it, removed third-party promotions from the game pages, re-pointed the internal links at our own site, and serve every asset from our own domain so a game never loads code from somewhere else mid-session.

Licensing matters to us. The original MIT license and the author attribution travel with the games, and we say so in the site footer on every page. What we deliberately do not host: commercial ROMs, console BIOS files, or unofficial ports of copyrighted arcade and console titles. Sites that do are one legal notice away from disappearing — we would rather build something that lasts. When similar mechanics remind you of the arcade greats, enjoy the homage; we never claim to be the original.

Privacy by design

Games compute locally and high scores live in your browser’s localStorage. There are no accounts, so there is nothing to leak; there is no payment anywhere on the site, so there is no billing data; and games never phone home while you play. The full details — what tiny amount of standard server logging exists, when analytics cookies could ever apply, and how to wipe your saved scores — are in the privacy policy, and the ground rules for using the site are in the terms of service. Both are short on purpose: a site that collects almost nothing does not need a novel.

How we choose and check games

A game earns a page here when it passes a short, practical checklist. It must be fun within ten seconds. It must run smoothly on a modest laptop and a mid-range phone. Its controls must make sense on both keyboard and touchscreen, or the page must say plainly which one it needs. And its page must contain real guidance — what the game is, how to play, the controls, a few honest tips — so you are never dropped into a black box. Games that cannot pass the checklist stay out of the catalog rather than shipping as empty pages.

The catalog itself is organised the way people actually look for a quick game: by mood and genre. Arcade for reflex loops, Puzzle for quiet logic, Classic for the games everyone already half-knows, and Action for when two minutes of intensity is the point. The full catalog keeps them all on one page.

Family-friendly by default

Nothing on the site is gated behind age checks, violence goes no further than cartoon asteroids and pixel ghosts, and there are no chat features, no user-generated content and no external links inside any game. Parents can hand over a tablet with a clear conscience: the worst thing that happens is a high score getting beaten. Teachers use several of the titles — Sudoku, Lights Out, Memory Match — as five-minute logic warm-ups for exactly the same reason.

We also keep the pages themselves quiet. No pop-ups, no interstitials, no autoplaying video, no newsletter modal interrupting the third move. The only things a game page loads are the game, its cover image, the fonts and — if you allow them — analytics. That restraint is deliberate and permanent: it is the difference between a site you bookmark and a site you close.

What is next

The collection keeps growing: more original WebAssembly flagships are in development, and existing pages gain polish based on how people actually play. If a control scheme feels wrong on mobile or a difficulty curve spikes unfairly, that is exactly the feedback that gets games fixed — the contact address below goes to a real inbox read by the people who build the site.