Super Monkey Ball ported to a website

Post by kidfiji » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 8:55 AM UTC

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 9:50 AM UTC

bloppe wrote: post #66

unleaded wrote: post #12

For some reason the opening settings page made me think this would be someone who just told claude to make a monkey ball style game.. maybe from seeing too much of that on HN. forgive me for that, this is awesome. As far as i can tell it's not even an emulator or a decompilation running in emscripten or anything like that, they remade the game in TypeScript. love stuff like this https://github.com/sndrec/WebMonkeyBal…

The website credits include roles for "decompilation" and "porting". So I guess it was decompiled from the original binary and ported to TS.

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #75

alexarena wrote: post #38

In 2006 the iPhone was announced without an App Store and Apple’s party line was to just build/use web apps. Fast forward to 2008 and the App Store is launched along with Super Monkey Ball – a day one app – the perfect game to demonstrate the power of a true native app that could _never_ be achieved on the web.

Fast forward to 2026 and after 15 years, the browser vendors have not yet provided anything remotely similar to RenderDoc, only SpectorJS survives, barely usable. Also this game remains the exception, Infinity Blade was released in 2010 to show what iPhone could do with OpenGL ES 3.0, the base for WebGL 2.0, and yet most Web games are basically Flash like remakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Blade "Infinit…

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #76

pjmlp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast forward to 2026 and after 15 years, the browser vendors have not yet provided anything remotely similar to RenderDoc, only SpectorJS survives, barely usable. Also this game remains the exception, Infinity Blade was released in 2010 to show what iPhone could do with OpenGL ES 3.0, the base for WebGL 2.0, and yet most Web games are basically Flash like remakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Blade "Infinit…

An easier answer to this is "why build web applications when you can build phone applications and monetize them?"

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #78

pixl97 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An easier answer to this is "why build web applications when you can build phone applications and monetize them?"

Not necessarily, because you get Web games via cloud streaming, where developers get a better experience and tooling instead of trying to work within the constraints of Web 3D APIs.