What Retro Arcade Hub is

Retro Arcade Hub is an independent website that builds and publishes original arcade games playable directly in a browser, alongside written guides explaining how they work and how to play them better.

There are 30 games at launch across six categories. Every one of them is a complete, playable HTML5 game — there are no placeholders, no coming-soon pages and no links that lead nowhere. If a game is listed on this site, you can play it right now, for free, without an account.

Why it exists

Two reasons, and they are related.

The first is that the arcade format is genuinely well suited to the browser and is under-served there. A three-minute game with no install, no account and no obligation fits how people actually have time available. The browser makes that possible with essentially zero friction, which is the same property that made arcade cabinets work in the first place.

The second is that most free browser game sites are aggregators. They host games made by other people, frequently without clear licensing, wrapped in an interface designed around advertising rather than playing. We wanted to find out what the alternative looked like: a small library of games we made ourselves, on a site built for the games rather than around them.

How the games are made

Every game is written in vanilla JavaScript against the HTML5 Canvas API. There is no game engine dependency, no framework and no build step for the games themselves — they are plain script files that the browser executes directly.

All 30 games share a common engine that handles what they have in common: the frame loop with delta timing, the state machine, input across keyboard, mouse and touch, the heads-up display, the pause and game-over overlays, particles, camera shake, scoring structures, and saving your best score locally. Each game file then contains only its own mechanics, which is what makes a library of 30 genuinely distinct games maintainable by a small team.

  • Graphics are drawn procedurally with Canvas primitives and hand-authored pixel sprite maps. There are no imported sprite sheets.
  • Audio is synthesised at runtime with the Web Audio API from oscillators and noise buffers. There are no audio files anywhere on this site.
  • Level content is either hand-designed or procedurally generated with guaranteed-solvable output.
  • Saving uses your browser's localStorage. Nothing is uploaded.
Our position on this

Retro Arcade Hub is inspired by the era and design principles of classic arcade gaming. It does not reproduce any commercial game.

We do not use characters, logos, sprites, music, sound effects, level layouts, trademarked names or artwork from any commercial game. Where a game here shares a genre with a famous title — a formation shooter, a brick breaker, a growing-tail arena game — it shares the genre, which is not any one company's property, and nothing else. The mechanics, artwork, audio, scoring and level content are our own.

If you believe anything on this site infringes a copyright you hold, please contact us with the details and we will investigate promptly.

Our editorial philosophy

The written content on this site exists to be useful, not to rank. In practice that means a few concrete commitments:

  • We write about the games on this site, which means we can check every mechanical claim against the code that implements it.
  • We do not pad articles to hit a word count. A guide is as long as its subject requires.
  • We say when we do not know something. The section on cognitive transfer in our reflexes guide is an example — the research is contested and we say so rather than picking the conclusion that sounds better.
  • We do not invent credentials, statistics, player counts, reviews, ratings or testimonials.

The full detail is in our editorial policy and fact-checking policy.

What we will not do

It is worth being explicit about this, because a lot of sites in this space do these things.

  • No fake numbers. We do not display player counts, online counts, download figures or global leaderboards, because we do not measure any of those things.
  • No fake social proof. No invented reviews, ratings, testimonials or awards.
  • No fake expertise. No claimed degrees, certifications, industry positions or employer affiliations.
  • No dark patterns. No fake close buttons, no ads disguised as game controls, no prompts encouraging ad clicks.
  • No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for and no personal data to give us.

How the site is funded

The site is built to support standard display advertising. Advertising containers are clearly labelled, are kept out of gameplay areas, and are never styled to resemble game controls or site navigation.

At the time of writing no advertising network is active on the site — the containers are in place and unfilled. We will not claim otherwise, and if that changes the privacy policy and cookie policy will be updated to describe exactly what any advertising partner does.

Get in touch

Feedback on the games is genuinely useful — bug reports especially, since we cannot test every browser and device combination ourselves. The contact page explains how to reach us.