Show HN: The HN Arcade

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reception and purpose

  • Commenters strongly like the idea of a central archive for HN-born games, noting it solves the problem of “I’ll check that out later” games disappearing in the feed.
  • Several highlight specific favorites (e.g., enclose.horse, Holedown) and appreciate seeing them collected in one place.
  • The fast-loading, simple, “retro” UI is generally praised.

Sorting, discovery, and UI

  • Multiple people criticize the initial purely alphabetical order as bad for discovery and recommendations.
  • Suggestions include:
    • Sorting by HN upvotes or popularity.
    • Random order or random starting position to avoid bias toward early alphabet entries.
    • A dedicated “random” button instead of always-random ordering (one commenter finds random lists irritating).
  • Many request screenshots or thumbnails/gifs on the cards to quickly convey what a game is like.
  • Some suggest surfacing tags like “paid” more clearly to set expectations.

Data quality and technical issues

  • Several users report incorrect or broken links (HN threads, GitHub repos, specific entries like sandspiel, Holedown, Lichess).
  • There’s a question about whether some data was LLM‑generated; it emerges that a few entries were AI-generated and not fully vetted.
  • Most entries come from a scraper or user submissions; code and scraping scripts are open on GitHub.
  • Minor tagging and categorization issues are noted (e.g., “browser” tag on what is really a hardware instructable).

Community submissions and related efforts

  • The thread becomes an impromptu game fair: many developers submit their games via GitHub issues or PRs (platformers, word games, party-game platforms, racing games, puzzle and hacking games, etc.).
  • Other similar or overlapping projects are shared, including another curated HN-games list with images, and an HN personal websites directory whose randomization approach is discussed.

Governance and longevity

  • One commenter suggests moving the project to a GitHub organization and having multiple maintainers to ensure long-term curation and avoid single-maintainer abandonment.
  • There’s mild skepticism about curated lists in general, noting some become self-promotion channels or stagnate once creators lose interest.