We grew up on the floor,
two feet from the TV.

WHAT IT IS

JOINR ARENA is a set of online multiplayer arcade arenas that run in your web browser. Each one takes a game we loved in the arcades — a maze-muncher, a space shooter, a meteor-blaster, a planet defender, a digger, a dungeon crawler, a falling-block puzzler, a kart racer, a first-person alien hunt and a line-drawing land grab — and links dozens of copies of it together, so you play your own game while raiding, racing and messing with the players either side of you.

There's nothing to download and nothing to sign up for. Type a name, pick an arena, press READY. Bots fill every empty seat, so a round is never empty, and every round ends on a leaderboard.

WHY

It started with a group of friends who wanted something fast and loud to play together on their phones, with real controllers clipped on, while talking. So it's built around exactly that: phone and clip-on pad first, open-mic voice chat with one tap, rounds short enough for a quick game, and bots so a round is never empty.

The games we picked are the ones that were on that TV. We didn't want to remake them; we wanted to put everyone in the same room with them. Forty-eight people in a maze-muncher. A kart race where every driver's face is their own. A ship full of marines with the Hive in the vents.

Everything is drawn and played in neon, with the bass turned up. Headphones recommended.