About Super Massive Games
Super Massive Games is run by a two-person team that has spent far too many hours arguing about input latency. We publish ten arcade games and eight tip sheets, and that is the entire catalogue. Nothing is licensed, nothing is embedded from another provider, and nothing waits for a countdown before it lets you press a key. The tagline at the top of every page — arcade that starts on the first click — is a specification we hold ourselves to, not a slogan the marketing department picked.
Why reflex games, and why a browser tab
Arcade games are the one genre where the browser is genuinely the right home. A round of Reaction Time lasts eight seconds. A good run of Mole Rush lasts sixty. Asking somebody to install a launcher, create an account and download four hundred megabytes for sixty seconds of play is absurd, and the installed-app model has quietly made short games worse by loading them with progression systems that exist to keep you opening the app.
The genre also survives compression better than any other. A cabinet from 1981 gave you one screen, one input scheme and a difficulty curve that climbed until you lost. That design still works on a phone held in one hand on a train, and it works without a tutorial, because the rules are visible in the first three seconds of play. We picked reflex, aim and timing games precisely because they lose nothing when the whole thing has to fit in a tab.
There is a practical complaint behind all of this too. Search for a classic arcade title and most of what comes back is the same handful of copied implementations, wrapped in a video ad you cannot skip and a page that pulls megabytes of third-party script to run a game that is a few kilobytes of logic. We wanted the reverse trade: a short menu, code we wrote ourselves and can therefore fix, and a page that opens on a weak connection.
How the games are actually built
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No framework, no bundler, no build step. Each game is a single script that loads only on its own page, on top of one shared stylesheet and one small shared script for site-wide things like the theme switch. View-source on any game page shows you the same file we edited; there is no compiled artefact standing between the two.
Every game runs on a fixed-timestep loop that consumes elapsed time in whole steps. That sounds like an implementation footnote and it is the single most important decision on the site: it is why the snake moves at the same rate on a 60 Hz laptop and a 144 Hz monitor, and why a timing window in Tower Stacker is the same width for everybody. Input is buffered rather than sampled, so a fast pair of keypresses both register instead of the second one being swallowed by a frame boundary.
Anything that has to be unpredictable — target placement, spawn order, the sequence in
Simon Sequence — comes from
crypto.getRandomValues(), and values that would skew the range are discarded instead of
squeezed into it, so no outcome ends up quietly likelier than its neighbour. A plain modulo over a pseudo-random integer carries a small bias, and
in a scoring game a small bias is the difference between "I got unlucky" being true and being an
excuse. It is more rigour than an arcade game strictly needs. We do it anyway.
Your scores stay on your device
There is no player account here, because there is no player database. Your best results are written
to your own browser's local storage under keys that begin with bg:, and they hold three
kinds of thing: a best score for each game at each difficulty or speed setting, whether you chose the
light or the dark theme, and whether you left game sound on or off. None of it is transmitted to us.
We could not read your high scores if we wanted to.
The honest cost of that choice: records are per browser and per device, so a run on your phone will never show up on your laptop, and clearing your browsing data wipes them permanently. There is no restore, because there is no copy. We think that is the right side of the trade — no leaderboard is worth building an account system for a game that lasts a minute.
The tip sheets
Eight written guides sit alongside the games, because "press start" is not an answer to somebody who wants to get better. Each one is written from playing the game in question, and each one aims to be concrete enough to change your next run rather than reassuring enough to be pleasant reading.
Two rules keep them credible. When a guide quotes a typical score, a difficulty level or a timing window, that number came out of sessions we played ourselves and is labelled an estimate; we will not publish a record we have no way to verify. And where a claim is genuinely disputed, such as whether aim drills transfer between games, the guide says it is disputed instead of choosing the flattering answer.
How the site is paid for
Advertising covers hosting, and it is kept out of the way of the thing you came for. No advertisement goes inside a playfield, where it could pass for a target, a button or part of the score, and none stands between you and the start of a round. The privacy policy spells out how third-party advertising uses cookies here and what you can switch off.
What Super Massive Games is not
It is not a casino and it is not adjacent to one. There is no wagering, no entry fee, no prize, no cash-out and no in-game currency that can be bought or exchanged for anything. No game here can be played for stakes, and the points you score have no value outside the page you scored them on. There is no login, no newsletter and no profile.
We also make no claims about your health or your brain. Reaction Time reports a number in milliseconds; that number is a toy, not a diagnostic result, and nothing on this site should be used to assess anyone's ability, fitness or condition. Any guide that touches the subject says so plainly.
Reach a person
A game that misbehaves on your device is worth telling us about, and specific reports get fixed first. Send the browser, the device and what you were doing when it broke, through the contact page or straight to [email protected].