If you grew up between Minesweeper and Solitaire, you will recognize it right away: a browser games portal has started making the rounds by imitating the Windows 98 desktop, with icons, a Start menu and even 3D Pinball. Behind the nostalgia, though, the site’s list of most popular games stands out, and not for a good reason.
What is there
The portal lists 184 games. Many are legitimate: free browser games, open-source projects such as NetHack and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and titles embedded from their developers’ own sites. But the front page highlights are something else: Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005), Need for Speed: Underground 2, GTA 2, GTA III, GTA: Vice City, Pro Evolution Soccer 6, Counter-Strike 1.6 and Hollow Knight.
The pages themselves call these games “unofficial WebAssembly ports”: the original game files stream into the browser as you play and stay in its cache. For Hollow Knight, the page says it is a technical demo made by an independent developer. The GTA V page does not even run the game on the site: it opens a different external address in a separate window. GTA V has no browser version, and pages like that are usually streams of unknown origin, ads or worse.
Why this is a problem
None of these ports is authorized by the publishers, and distributing the files of commercial games without a license is copyright infringement. Rights holders tend to react: in 2021, Take-Two sued the developers of the reverse-engineering projects for GTA III and Vice City. For players, the risks are practical: the content can disappear at any moment, saves live only in the browser cache and vanish when it is cleared, and external addresses promising “GTA V in the browser” are fertile ground for scams and malicious pages.
The interest in playing classics without installing anything is real, and there is a legal route for much of it: Ported2Browser, for example, gathers games that run in the browser with permission or as open source, as we showed here.
How to play legally
Hollow Knight is still sold on PC and consoles and is often cheap on sale. The classic GTA trilogy exists as The Definitive Edition, and GTA V is still on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. Counter-Strike 1.6 is still sold on Steam, and Counter-Strike 2 is free. The Need for Speed series and Konami’s football games (now the free-to-play eFootball) also have current official versions.
SavePoint reports that this portal exists and why it is getting attention, but does not share its address, explain how to use it or recommend it.
Sources: SavePoint’s own reading of the portal’s pages; Take-Two’s lawsuit against the re3 and reVC projects (2021).
Lady Combo