Why Joyantenna exists

The problem isn’t that there are too few good free browser games. The problem is that the good ones are buried under thirty years of abandonware directories, unfinished Itch.io jam entries, and browser-game aggregators that treat “free” and “legal” as optional footnotes.

There are genuinely excellent games that run in a tab, ask nothing of you, and are legitimately free to play. Freeciv-web is one. Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection is another. The Internet Archive has thousands of legally preserved classic titles. Lichess exists and it is free in the fullest, most philosophically complete sense of the word.

Nobody had made a guide that took curation seriously. So we made one.

What “curation” actually means here

The word gets overloaded. On Joyantenna it means three specific things:

Legal standing. Every channel links to a game that is open-source, public domain, or officially preserved. We don’t link to ROM repositories or unofficial emulators for proprietary titles. Every channel page includes a licence block — not as boilerplate, but as a useful fact you might care about.

Playability. The game has to work. In a desktop browser. Without creating an account first. This disqualifies a surprising number of otherwise good candidates.

Worth your time. This is the hardest criterion to formalise, and the one that matters most. A game with a 30-minute lifespan that is executed well belongs here. A technically ambitious project that never got off the ground doesn’t, regardless of how impressive its GitHub stars are.

What we’re not trying to be

Joyantenna is not a database. It is not trying to catalogue every browser game ever made. The Internet Archive already exists.

It is not a recommendation engine. There is no algorithm deciding what you should play next based on your history. The “Surprise Me” button is about as sophisticated as we get.

It is not trying to grow. The channel count is small because the selection bar is high. That’s the feature.

What comes next

Channels will keep being added as qualifying games come along. The Signal blog will publish notes on specific games, on the history of browser gaming as a medium, and on whatever is interesting about the games that make the guide.

If you know a game that belongs here, the submit page is the right place to start.