What we will never do
We will never copy. Every sentence in the museum was written for it, and every picture, sound and animation is generated by code on this site. There are no screenshots of real games, no sprites, no box art, no logos, no recorded music and no character names borrowed to look familiar. The games on Eracade are original works made in-house, built to capture the feel of a period without borrowing its property.
We state history in general terms and keep dates to the ones that are well documented. Product and company names appear only where the history cannot be told without them, and then only as facts. Nothing here implies that any maker or publisher has endorsed Eracade, and we are not affiliated with any of them.
Where the facts come from
The technical explanations (how a beam draws a line, why a shadow mask softens a pixel, how a modem handshake is structured) come from textbook-level public knowledge, and each hall ends with a short list of stable, general references. We prefer encyclopaedic pages, standards documents and preservation projects over opinion. When memory and a source disagree, the source wins.
The timeline is deliberately not a list of firsts. Claims of firsts are slippery and often wrong, so each entry is about what a year made possible, in language we are confident about. If you know better, please say so.
How the exhibits behave
- Local and quiet. The exhibits run in your browser and load nothing from other sites. The settings you save (a CRT preset, a loading-screen style, hall stamps) live in this browser only.
- Motion on request. If your system asks for reduced motion, the exhibits start still and offer an explicit switch to turn motion on. Nothing flashes faster than three times a second.
- Sound on request. Audio never plays on page load. The dial-up room makes sound only after you press Dial, has a volume control and a stop button, and carries a text transcript.
- Keyboard and screen reader. Every control is a real button, slider or field with a label, and every exhibit begins with a plain-text explanation. Details are in the accessibility statement.
Preservation, with thanks
A great deal of web-era game history survives because volunteers collected it, catalogued it and built tools to run it. We link to some of them from the Flash hall and the loading-bar wing. Eracade hosts only its own work, and we are not a substitute for an archive.
Corrections
Write to hello@eracade.com with the page, the sentence and what you think is right. If you can point to a public source, even better. We will fix mistakes of fact quickly and say so on this page.
Corrections log. None yet. The museum opened on 26 October 2026.