Retrojar is a notebook with games attached. We track down browser-playable titles that wear their pixel-art roots on their sleeve — sometimes restorations of 1970s arcade staples, sometimes recent indie work that channels the feel of an era none of us were alive for — and we write a little something about each.
The catalog is intentionally small. A hundred titles, ish. The point of this place is not breadth. The point is that every game on it has a reason to be on it, and the reason is laid out in writing on its page.
The four eras
We bucket games into four style eras. They are not historical decades — everything here is modern HTML5 — but rather four flavors of retro the site keeps coming back to:
- '70s · Arcade Originals. Single-screen action descended from Asteroids, Pong, Galaxian. The economic logic of a 25-cent coin still lives in their bones.
- '80s · Pixel Platformers. Jump, run, fall, repeat. Sprite-driven games that owe everything to the NES era of platforming.
- '90s · Pixel Puzzles. Logic at painterly resolution. Tetris-likes, nonograms, match-three games that take pixel art seriously as a design choice.
- NEW · Modern Throwbacks. Games made yesterday in the style of games made forty years ago. The most varied category, and where most of the surprises live.
The writeups
Every game page on Retrojar opens with the game's own description and continues with instructions where the developer provided them. Where we can add useful context — what the developer was going for, how a title relates to the broader pixel-art tradition, what feels worth saying — we do. Where we can't, we let the game speak.
None of it is auto-summarized. None of it is bulk-imported. The catalog is small because the writing is real.
The business
Retrojar carries advertising via Google AdSense. The games themselves are served from GameDistribution's network and may carry ads inside the frame; those run on the developer's account, not ours. There's nothing to buy on Retrojar, nothing to sign up for, no email list to join.
Get in touch
Mail goes to [email protected]. Submissions, corrections, takedowns, conversation about Mega Man — all welcome. See the contact page for what tends to get through.