The Alpine Arcade is open. We're starting with 12 free retro games at alpine.io/arcade, made by our team here in Bend. They play in the browser on a phone, tablet or computer, with nothing to download and no account to make. Pick a game, press Start, and see if you can put your initials on the board.
What's in the arcade
Action games, each based on an arcade classic and built for a touchscreen:
- Avalanche: Missile Command on a mountainside. Tap the sky to fire snow charges and break up the boulders before they bury the huts in the valley.
- Icebreaker: Breakout in a glacier cave. Drag anywhere to steer your sled and keep the puck in play, with power-ups along the way.
- Slalom: Downhill through the gates, after Taito's Alpine Ski. Miss too many gates and the Yeti comes down the hill after you.
- Yeti: A maze chase in an ice cave. Collect the snowflakes while four yetis hunt you, and drink the hot cocoa to turn the tables.
- Floe: A crossing in the spirit of Frogger. Hop up a busy slope and across a river of breaking ice to bring five climbers home to camp.
Word games and puzzles:
- Crevasse: Cross a Cascade glacier without falling in. It was the arcade's first game.
- Whiteout: One hidden word, six tries.
- Summit: Make words from seven letters against the clock.
- Scramble: Unscramble words and keep your streak going.
- Search Party: A word search, hidden any way at all.
- Cairns: Sudoku above the treeline.
- Traverse: A small crossword with fresh clues every game.
The word games check your guesses against a dictionary of more than 247,000 words, so if it's a real word, it counts.
Built for the phone in your pocket
Every game goes full screen when you press Start, and none of them need a keyboard. You tap, drag and swipe, and the controls are designed so your thumb doesn't cover the action. On a computer, the mouse and arrow keys work too. You can add the arcade to your home screen, and it opens like an app.
There's music, if you'd like it. Turn it on once and the arcade remembers.
High scores you can trust
Each game has a shared leaderboard. When you finish, the server checks the game before your score goes on the board. For the word games and puzzles, it checks your answers. For the action games, it replays your moves frame by frame and works out the score itself. A score typed in by hand doesn't get on the board.
When only a few people are playing, the board shows all-time scores. As more people play, boards for the month, the week and the day appear, so a new player always has a chance at the top spot.
Why a development company built an arcade
Games are one of the hardest things to build for the web. They have to respond instantly, look right on every screen size, work with fingers, mice and keyboards, keep score on a server, and stay fast for people everywhere. That's the same list of jobs a good business app has to do.
The arcade runs on the same platform as the rest of alpine.io: an Astro app on Cloudflare's global network, with a database for the leaderboards. Everything we used to build it, we use for our clients' sites and apps.
Your app is next
The team is ready to take on your app. That might be:
- a customer portal, booking tool or quote calculator;
- an internal dashboard that replaces a tangle of spreadsheets;
- an interactive product demo, quiz or game for a marketing campaign or an event;
- or a website that does more than sit there.
If you've got an idea, let's talk. Book an intro call or email support@alpine.io. Then go and set a high score. We'll be checking the boards.