About the Arcade
A webmaster's note, from the front page of every good games portal in this era: Epic Arcade Games started as a single page with one game and a hit counter, and grew one Flash file at a time until it needed its own sidebar just to hold the category list. This tribute page is built the same way that first page was -- plain HTML and CSS, no build tools, no scripting -- as a deliberate nod to a period of the web where a site's whole personality lived in its stylesheet, not its framework.
None of the four games listed here ever actually shipped. Each one is a description of a game that could have: a match-and-pop puzzle, a ninja platformer three sequels deep, an "educational" monster-versus-arithmetic game, and a parking sim for people who failed their driving test. Writing them this way -- box art, rules, a fake high-score table -- was the honest way to capture the era's look without pretending a static site can run a game it never could.
Why this look?
A neon purple-and-aqua glow, a scrolling marquee, "best viewed at 800x600" -- every one of these went extinct once responsive, minimal, mobile-first design took over the web. This page brings a few of them back on purpose: a dark, glowing colourway, a fixed-feeling centred layout, and link-tables standing in for the grid-of-buttons every games portal from this era had. It still holds together on a phone screen, because a good tribute to an old era shouldn't need to be unusable to prove its point.
What it's built with
- Plain HTML5, one file per page.
- One shared stylesheet, no preprocessor.
- Zero JavaScript. Zero build step in the browser.