Microsoft has been working on many different projects to showcase the power of HTML5 over the last few months but this time, they have gone all out. Microsoft has teamed up with Atari to bring you some of the classic games of the past to the present with the power of HTML5.
Microsoft and Atari are bringing many of the games from your childhood right into your browser. If you watch the video above, you can get a sense of how these games will work with touch and keyboard input. Some of the games that are included with this project are Asteroids, Centipede, Lunar Lander, Missile Command, and Yars and you can check out the games right now in your browser, provided it is a modern browser, with this link here.
While the games are certainly the high point, tons of folks made this a project a reality and put a lot of effort into making this project a reality. Porting these classics to HTML5 was not a simple task and required a lot of legwork on the backend. The good news here is that Microsoft is going to share the knowledge (and code) that they used to create these games on GitHub which will allow other devlopers to leverage Microsoft's newfound knowledge.
The games will work on any device and the Atari Arcade is able to determine your platform and adjust between 3D and 2D elements and 60FPS and 30 FPS, to keep the content running smoothly on your machine; all of the visual elements in these games are using EaseJS.
Grant Skinner has also created Zoe, a tool that gathers the image vectors assets and exports them into spritesheets that developers can use with EaselJS game physics in one-click; you can check out Grant Skinner's work over at over gskinner.com.
There really is a lot to love about this project beyond the hours that you undoubtedly sink into these classic games. Make sure to check out the Microsoft blog to learn more, especially if you are on the developer side of the fence so you can get your hands on the entire CreateJS suite.
Oh, and one more thing. We should warn you before heading over to play these games, it's quite likely you will dump a few hours into them, they are that good, so plan accordingly.
Source: Microsoft
Play: Atari Arcade
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