anorak (n., British slang) — someone with an obsessive, encyclopaedic love of a niche subject. This arcade is built by anoraks, about the thing under the fun: why certain games grab a brain and won't let go — and whether you can rebuild that grip from scratch.
Most "tributes" to a classic clone its surface — the blocks, the colours, the controls. We wanted the opposite: ignore the surface entirely and reverse-engineer the machine underneath. What is the actual psychological loop that makes a game like Tetris feel impossible to put down? And once you can name that loop precisely, can you build brand-new games that pull the same levers — without copying a single block?
Anorak Arcade is the answer to that question, made playable. Every game here is an original system engineered from researched first principles, not a reskin of anything.
It started with a single brief — research why Tetris works down to the neuroscience, then build original prototypes that hit the same nerve:
“Conduct deep research on what makes the game ‘Tetris’ successful. Its history. Its story. Its mechanics. Its execution. What makes it give dopamine. Why is it so successful.
Then … create research-backed prototypes that try to capture the same elements of Tetris, without copying it. We go to the engineering — bio-engineering! — roots and philosophies of why Tetris works, and recreate prototypes that fulfil the same needs/philosophies from a game-theory perspective, but as a fresh, new concept we can claim as our own.”
We treated it like an engineering teardown:
History, mechanics, and — most importantly — the neuroscience: dopaminergic wanting vs. liking, reward-prediction-error, the Zeigarnik tension of unfinished tasks, flow state, and the clinical "Tetris effect" work on intrusive memory and craving.
Perpetual pressure, order from chaos, tractable decisions, tension→resolution rhythm, transparent state, mastery ceiling, fairness, self-scaling difficulty — plus the neuro-loop that connects them.
Original prototypes, each a different core action, engineered to fire the same pillars with no falling tetrominoes and no line clears.
Keep what snaps, deepen what sings. CINDER (containment) and SHIFT (the shifting field) emerged as front-runners and got real game-feel investment.
An arcade for friends — a place to drop in for 30 seconds or 30 minutes, chase a personal best, and compare notes. It now lives on the web and as a native app, with persistent leaderboards and a tiny data layer tracking plays and high scores. The lab keeps running underneath it: every new game starts as a research question.
A few principles we refuse to compromise on — the kind of thing we, as players, wish more arcades got right:
No account, no wall, no spinner. On the app, every game ships inside it — so the whole arcade plays with no signal at all. Open it on a plane, in a tunnel, in the middle of nowhere, and the whole lineup is there. We detest games that won't start until you log in; you'll never meet one here.
Your personal bests live on your device, always — free, anonymous, yours. Signing in does exactly one thing: it lets a score land on the global leaderboard, under your name, verified. Signing in is the price of competing — never the price of playing.
Every game is original, written from scratch — pure HTML5 canvas, no engine, no framework, no tracking libraries riding along. The whole thing is small enough to read. The source is open ↗.
New games arrive as the research does — each one a fresh question about what makes a loop grip. The catalog grows; the arcade you already have just gets bigger.
“Thank you for playing my game.”