Hold SPACE and move with the arrow keys to cut territory. Close the loop back onto a wall to claim it. Grab 75% to clear the node.
*** NEW ELITE HACKER ***
RANK #1
CODEMASH is a retro-terminal love letter to a classic arcade game. You're a rogue process carving territory out of a hostile network — dodge the Kernel Worm, outmaneuver the Firewall Tracers, and exfiltrate as much data as you can before your proxies run out.
Zero install, zero build. Just open the page and play. The page does serve ads via Google Ad Manager to help keep the game free — see the privacy policy for the details on cookies and how to opt out.
A modern reimagining of a classic arcade game with a cyberpunk terminal aesthetic. The rules are familiar — claim 75% of the board by drawing rectangles around a roaming hazard — but the juice (particles, combos, shockwaves, CRT scanlines) is entirely new.
Hold SHIFT (or tap STEALTH on touch) while drawing. Stealth draws are slower but score 2x when more than half the path was drawn in stealth mode. Chain captures within 5 seconds of each other for escalating combo multipliers.
If you pause mid-draw for more than a beat, a burning fuse spawns at the start of your path and races along your line toward you. Keep moving once you start cutting. If the fuse catches up, you lose a proxy.
The Kernel Worm (the rainbow spinning line) bounces around the unclaimed playfield. If it touches any part of your in-flight drawing path, you die. The Firewall Tracers (red orbs) patrol the walls — touching one on a border cell also kills you. Trap the worm in a tiny corner for massive bonus points.
Yes. Touch controls appear automatically on any device that reports a coarse pointer, including Chromebook touchscreens and 2-in-1 tablets. The layout can be flipped to left-handed mode under Settings → Swap mobile controls.
Yes. Open the CFG button (top-right) or the settings link on the start screen. You can toggle reduce motion to disable camera shake, zoom-kick, hit-stop, chromatic aberration and the full-screen flash — helpful for photosensitive players — as well as mute audio and swap the mobile control layout.
Yes, locally in your browser via localStorage.
The top 10 are shown on the start / game-over screen. Clearing
site data for this page resets the leaderboard.
The core game loop runs entirely in your browser with no backend. Three external dependencies load from public CDNs on first visit — Tailwind CSS, the Share Tech Mono font, and Google Ad Manager ad tags — so you'll want to be online the first time. After the page is cached the game itself will still play if your connection drops mid-session.
The game itself stores your high scores and settings in
localStorage on your own device — that
never leaves your browser. The page also shows
advertisements via Google Ad Manager, which may use
cookies to serve ads. You can review and change your
choice any time via the Cookie settings link in
the footer, and full details live in the
privacy policy.
Nibble. A single 5% capture near a wall is almost free. Big, ambitious cuts are tempting because they score more, but they leave you exposed to the worm for longer. Use stealth draw when you're making a big cut so the 2x multiplier pays for the extra risk. And chain captures inside the 5s combo window — the multiplier is the single biggest score source in the game.
A product of Blue Wizard Digital — plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no frameworks, no build step.