ABOUT

Hyper Global Mega Games is a shelf of new browser games written in the styles of the 1980s and 1990s. It started with the ZX Spectrum — 256×192 pixels, fifteen colours and a beeper — and goes wherever a game is better for it: 16-bit fighters, a top-down football game, a quiz machine. Everything here runs in the page, on a computer or a phone. You don’t need to install anything or create an account.

Hyper Global Mega Games is made by Simon, a solo developer based in the UK who builds original retro-style games.

NEW GAMES, OLD CLOTHES

None of these games is a re-release, a port or a ROM. Each one was written for this site, and each was released here first. The boxes say Gassoft Ltd, Gassoft Iberica or Gassoft do Brasil, and they give a year like 1984 or 1994. That is the fiction each game is dressed in. Gassoft is a software house that never existed, and the year is the era the game is pretending to come from. Each game’s page shows the date it actually came out.

The point is to make the games those machines might have had. Sometimes that’s a joke that wouldn’t have got past a 1984 publisher, like a hero propelled by his own wind. Sometimes it’s a subject nobody made a game of, like a first-person crawl through the English Civil War that keeps its real history apart from its fiction. Sometimes it’s the cup run a real football club didn’t get.

HOW THE GAMES ARE MADE

Every game is plain JavaScript drawing onto an HTML canvas. None of them uses a game engine or a framework, and none loads an image or a sound file. Every sprite, background and title screen is drawn by the game’s own code as it runs, pixel by pixel, the way a 1980s game had to. The music and sound effects are synthesised in your browser with the Web Audio API, from square waves and noise, much as a Spectrum’s beeper or a 16-bit sound chip would have made them. Most whole games come in under 150 kilobytes, which is smaller than a typical photo on a news site.

Most of the games are also tested by scripts that play them, with no browser and no person involved. The fighting games are put through their whole ladder with every character, and the results show how the difficulty climbs. The Civil War crawl is played down both sides’ roads to an ending, and every one of its maps is flood-filled to prove you can walk to everything on it. Every game is checked to make sure it can be started from a touch screen.

The games are served from a separate domain from this one. That keeps them sealed off from the rest of the site. It’s also why no advertising can ever appear inside a game.

AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy something through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not affect which products we list or what we say about them.

ADS AND PRIVACY

Advertising pays for the hosting. Ads are served by Google AdSense, which chooses where they go. Google and its partners use cookies and similar identifiers to serve and measure them. More detail is in how Google uses information from sites that use its services.

If you are in the UK or the EEA you will be asked, before any personalised advertising happens, whether you consent to it. That message comes from Google’s own consent tool, and your answer is remembered and respected. You can change it at any time from the privacy link in the consent message. Choosing “reject” does not lock you out of anything here — the games do not depend on advertising to run.

No advertising runs inside a game, or on the page that plays one. Games are served from a separate domain that carries no advertising code at all, so this is a fact about how the site is built rather than a promise about how it is configured.

The full privacy policy covers what this site itself stores: high scores, the shared scoreboard and the contact form.

TAKEDOWN