About Cat Arcade

Cat Arcade is a small independent website that does two things: it builds original cat-themed browser games, and it writes guides explaining how arcade games actually work. Both halves are made here. Nothing on this site is licensed in, embedded from elsewhere, or republished from another publication.

What Cat Arcade is

The site began from a simple observation: most browser game sites are catalogues of other people's games wrapped in advertising, and most of them cannot tell you anything about the games they host. We wanted the opposite - a small number of games we built ourselves, explained properly, alongside writing that treats arcade design as something worth understanding rather than just something to click.

Every game here is written in HTML5 Canvas and vanilla JavaScript. There is no game engine, no framework, no third-party game files and no plugin. That is partly a performance decision - the games load in a second or two on a modest phone - and partly an editorial one. We can explain how a game works because we wrote every line of it.

Why we build cat games specifically

A cat is an unusually efficient player character. Players already know what a cat can do - pounce, climb, land well, chase small moving things - so a cat game can dispense with most of its tutorial. Put a cat on a rooftop and nobody needs to be told that the aim is to jump to the next one. That saved explanation is worth a great deal in a game that has only a few seconds to make itself understood.

Cats are also a subject people genuinely enjoy, which matters for a site meant to be pleasant to spend time on. We are not pretending otherwise.

What we publish

Original games

Twelve playable games at present, each with its own page explaining the mechanics, controls and tactics. Every game is finished and playable - there are no placeholder cards and no "coming soon" entries.

Explanatory guides

Articles on how arcade mechanics work: collision detection, difficulty curves, jump physics, scoring systems, procedural generation. These are written for players and for people curious about game development, not for search engines.

Practical tips

Game-specific advice based on actually playing the games repeatedly. When we say a technique works, it is because it worked for us across many attempts, and we say so in those terms rather than presenting it as research.

Editorial standards

Our full process is set out in the editorial policy and the fact-checking policy. The short version: we do not invent statistics, we do not fabricate quotations or studies, we do not publish ratings or review counts we have not collected, and we do not describe a game feature that does not exist. If we cannot verify a claim, we either leave it out or say plainly that it is our opinion.

Where an article makes a claim about a specific game on this site, that claim has been checked against the game's source code, because we have the source code.

What we will not do

• Host, embed or link to games we did not build.
• Use copyrighted characters, sprites, screenshots, sounds or brand names belonging to anyone else.
• Publish invented statistics, fake user counts, fake awards or fake review scores.
• Claim professional credentials, employers or qualifications that do not exist.
• Ask for personal information we have no use for. The games store your preferences and scores in your own browser and nowhere else.
• Place advertising over game controls, or design an ad slot to be mistaken for a button.

How the site is funded

Cat Arcade is intended to be supported by advertising. Ad slots are clearly separated from editorial content and from game controls, and advertising has no influence on what we write - the separation is described in the editorial policy. If the site ever carries sponsored content, it will be labelled as such on the page itself.

The site remains fully usable with an ad blocker, and we have not built anything that detects or objects to one.

Who writes it

Editorial content is published under Ethan Carter, the site's editorial persona for browser gaming and arcade mechanics. The author page explains exactly what that means, including what it does not claim.

Getting in touch

Corrections, bug reports, accessibility problems and general questions are all welcome through the contact page. Reports that a game behaves incorrectly are especially useful - if a generated level is genuinely impossible or a control does not respond on your device, we want to know.