Vintage JavaScript game restoration

30 Dec 2013

At a recent Amsterdam Clojurians meetup the topic was game development. Some of the first code I played around with in high school were games in JavaScript. These games were great as an introduction to programming because all that is needed to play around with them is a browser, 'view source' and notepad. My favorite JavaScript games then were made by K. Moriyama. His site from 1996 is still available online today in its original form: K. Moriyama's Home Page, including a matrix led visitor counter and gradient word-art like header.

Mr. Moriyama took great care to make sure his games were playable on most browsers, including Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 3. Sadly, current browsers cannot run the JavaScript anymore. The game I like most is JS Falcon. To be able to play this game again I have dusted of the old JavaScript. All that needed changing were some DOM traversal paths and the main loop's update interval. The server-side high score bookkeeping has been removed from this version.

JS Falcon below works again in Chrome (at least version 30+):

Of course the inner workings of this game are available through right click and 'view source'.

This Invader-like game by K. Moriyama that only uses ASCII in a textarea still works today!