The arcade — one screen, one grid, nothing moves until you do
Spool is an original game written for this page. Collect every cell of tape. Each move advances every spool one step along its own line — and waiting counts as a move — so a board is a logic problem rather than a test of reaction.
Arrow keys or W A S D to move · space to wait · R to restart
Collect every cell of tape. Each move advances every spool one step along its own line, so a spool cannot be outrun — only timed. Nothing is stored and no score leaves your browser.
What replaced the old arcade, and why
Two separate problems, neither of them solvable by restoration.
The games once playable on this page ran on a browser plug-in that has been removed from every current browser and is not coming back. That alone would end the matter, and it is not the more serious problem.
The more serious problem is that several of them were versions of arcade titles whose names remain live trademarks held by companies that are still trading. Restoring an unlicensed copy of somebody else's game because it happened to be here twenty years ago would not be preservation. This archive documents games and does not reproduce them, and that applies to its own history as much as to anyone else's.
So the page keeps its function and changes its content. Spool is written from scratch. What it borrows is the grammar of the period — a single screen, a grid, deterministic movement, and a design where the difficulty is entirely in the arrangement. That grammar is not anybody's property, and it is the part actually worth carrying forward.
Questions about the arcade
What changed, how Spool plays, and why nothing moves until you do.
Why is the arcade an original game rather than the old one?
Because the games that were once playable here ran on a browser plug-in that no longer exists in any current browser, and because several of them were unlicensed versions of arcade titles whose names are still live trademarks. Neither problem is fixable by restoring them.
Spool is a new game written for this page. It borrows the grammar of the era — one screen, a grid, deterministic movement — and none of its content.
How does Spool work?
Every cell of tape has to be collected. Nothing on the board moves until you do, and each move you make advances every spool one cell along its own line, bouncing back when it meets a wall. The line each spool patrols is drawn faintly on the board, and the notch on a spool shows which way it goes next, so a board can be read before it is played.
The run ends if you and a spool meet: walking into one ends it exactly as being caught by one does. Waiting is a move — the board advances and you do not — which is how a patrolled corridor is crossed.
There is no reflex component at all. A board is a logic problem with a solution, and losing is a planning error rather than a slow reaction, which is the design value the puzzle games in this archive were built on.
Are the boards actually solvable?
Yes, and not as an assumption. Each of the three was checked by walking a solver over it under the same rules the game uses, which confirms that every cell of tape can be reached and returns the shortest winning sequence that exists — 28, 49 and 53 moves respectively.
Waiting is never forced: all three boards can be finished without it. It earns its place on the second board, where the best solution uses it and the best line without it takes a move longer, and on every board it is the move that lets a patrolled corridor be timed rather than raced.
Does it need a keyboard?
It plays with the arrow keys or W, A, S and D, space to wait and R to restart the board. Every one of those is also an on-screen button, with wait in the middle of the pad where a hand already is, so a touch device loses nothing. Nothing is stored, no score is transmitted, and there is no account.
Why does nothing move until the player moves?
It is the defining property of the puzzle games this archive holds the most of. When the board only advances in response to a move, every failure is attributable and every screen has a solution — so difficulty comes from the design rather than from the hardware being faster than you are.