Free(ing) web games

In the past weeks I added loads of fun to the collection of free web services. Many great modern web games are not licensed and there are several contests and platforms that showcase open web technologies but don‘t bother about freedom. So I contacted the developers – with great results:

• Marble Run, winner of Mozilla Labs Game On 2010, is now MIT licensed
• WebGL draughts by Jordi Mariné Fort is now GPL licensed
• StillAliveJS, a Portal in 2D by Christophe/t4ils is AGPL licensed
• Element Dots by Yarik is now MIT licensed
• Roto Game, a set of puzzles by Felix Klee is now Apache licensed
• Marbleo.us, a 3D marble run by Robert Böhnke & Simon Hohberg is now MIT licensed
• Yirtok, a different approach at a shoot ’em up by Dennis Ranke is now MIT licensed
• Spacewar by David Case is now under MIT license
• Simon Tatham‘s Portable Puzzle Collection was ported to JavaScript and MIT licensed by Jacques le Roux
• Bonus: Stephen Eisenhauer‘s HTML5 drum machine is now licensed under simplified BSD

Soon to be freely licensed are:

• RPG JS, a game engine for role playing games with an example game
• Berts Breakdown, a 3D jump ’n’ run by Paul Brunt

All these are added to the already existing fantastic free and open source web-based games:

• Robots Are People Too (GPL) is a 2-player jump ’n’ run that won the »Most Fun« award of Mozilla Labs Game On 2010
• Freeciv.net (AGPL) is a free software web version of Civilization
• Slither (LGPL) by Erik Johnson is a modern replica of Snake
• Achtung die Kurve (MIT) is a great remake of the multiplayer classic by the people who brought you Marble Run
• Sweeper Cell (MIT) is a remake of MineSweeper
• WPilot (MIT) by Johan Dahlberg is similar to XPilot or a multiplayer Asteroids without asteroids
• Space Break (GPL) is a Breakout clone by Jonas Wagner
• Web Mega Pong and Missile Fleet are both GPL licensed and made with the CAKE library (MIT)
• Go vs Go (MIT) is, well, the Chinese board game Go
• Lichess (CC-BY-NC, unfortunately NC) by Thibault Duplessis is pure awesomechess
• Asteroids & Arena5 are both MIT licensed shoot ’em ups by Kevin Roast
• Pentagoo (MIT) is inspired by the board game Pentago
• Manic Monkey Madness (MIT) is a multiplayer game similar to Angry Birds
• Orbium (GPL) is a mobile puzzle game
• Zlizer is a demo of the LimeJS game framework (Apache)
• Atomix (GPL) is a port of the KDE puzzle game KAtomic
• Pipes (GPL) is an old-school pipe connecting puzzle
• Vectomatic (GPL) are some games for children
• The Space Game (GPL) is a crowdsourced approach at trajectory optimization
• The Humanity Project (AGPL) is an interesting approach to reality gaming by free software game studio Farsides

Thanks to all the developers and to Mozilla Labs Game On, Mozilla Demo Studio & Chrome Experiments for providing such great platforms! There are still many applications without license information on the list.

If you know any more freely licensed web-based applications or develop one and have licensing questions – don’t hesitate to contact me.