How we pick which arcade classics to remake (and the ones we walked away from)

About a third of the catalogue on this site is remakes of older games. Frog Hopper is Frogger. Jazz Ball is Jezzball. Cowboy Hangman is hangman. Cribbage Online is the 1630s card game basically unchanged. We have also looked at and walked away from at least a dozen other classics. I want to write down what we use to decide, because the process has been more interesting than I expected.

The test: does the core loop still work?

The question we ask every time is: if we strip away the nostalgia and the graphics, is the input loop still fun in 2026? Some classics pass this test trivially. Tetris passes. Pac-Man passes. Frogger passes. The thing your fingers do in those games is still satisfying decades later because the designers got the press-and-respond rhythm right. Other classics fail it. We will get to those.

The second question is: can a five-year-old understand the goal in two seconds? This rules out a lot of older games where the goal requires reading. The original Adventure on the Atari 2600 was a brilliant game in its time, but a kid today opens it, sees a dot wandering around a maze, and has no idea what they're supposed to do. There's no on-ramp.

If a game passes both tests, we usually remake it. Frogger passes both. Pac-Man passes both. Jezzball passes both (you see the bouncing balls and the cursor; you click; a wall grows; the goal is obvious within ten seconds). Tetris passes both.

Games we made and were glad we did

Jezzball. The mechanic is one of the cleverest in 1990s puzzle design. We've described why elsewhere, but the short version: it's one input, one rule, infinite depth. Every level you play, you learn something about ball trajectories that helps the next one. It ages perfectly.

Frogger. A two-second tutorial. The frog is at the bottom; the home spots are at the top; you can see the cars and the river. You will figure out within one death what you're supposed to do. The pattern-recognition skill it rewards is real and you can keep getting better at it forever.

Cribbage. Different category entirely — it's not an arcade game, it's a card game. But the design is so robust that it has survived four hundred years of changing cultural taste, and the AI we built makes it accessible to anyone who has never been taught the scoring system. The peg board is the secret weapon: the scoring happens too fast for paper, and the visual progress is constantly motivating.

Hangman. The simplest possible educational game. We didn't change the mechanic. We just gave it a cowboy theme so kids weren't staring at a literal gallows.

Games we looked at and walked away from

Pong. We built a prototype. It was technically a perfect Pong clone. We watched our kids play it for forty seconds before they got bored. The problem isn't that Pong is bad — it's that single-player Pong against an AI is just paddle-tracking, and there's no skill ceiling worth climbing. Pong needs two humans, and we don't have multiplayer infrastructure. Walked away.

Space Invaders. The mechanic still works, but the difficulty curve in the original is built around the arcade business model of taking your quarters every two minutes. To remake it for the browser, you'd have to redesign the difficulty curve entirely, and at that point you're not making Space Invaders, you're making a new game in the shape of Space Invaders. We might still do this one day; we just haven't.

Asteroids. Same problem as Space Invaders. The vector graphics aesthetic is beautiful but the loop is repetitive without modern progression mechanics, and we don't want to add progression mechanics because then it isn't Asteroids anymore.

Centipede. Would be fun, but it's twitch-reflex-dependent in a way that doesn't reward thinking. We try to avoid games where the only skill is reaction time.

Q*bert. The controls in the original are notoriously confusing because of the isometric perspective. Every casual player who has ever played Q*bert has at some point thought "I pressed up, why did the character go diagonal?" We could have fixed this with a control rebinding, but that's a different game.

The pattern

The classics that survive a remake are the ones where, after fifty plays, you are smarter, not just faster. Tetris rewards smarter stacking. Frogger rewards smarter pattern reading. Jezzball rewards smarter trajectory prediction. Cribbage rewards smarter discard decisions. Pong rewards faster reflexes, which has a hard ceiling and isn't really getting smarter.

If a forty-year-old game design still pushes a thoughtful player to improve, it earns another remake. If it just rewards reaction time, we leave it alone. The graveyard of unmade prototypes on my hard drive is mostly the latter category.

— Chris