NOBODY CLICKED

The census

Nobody Clicked publishes one game a day, but the sweep sees far more than it prints. Every eligible browser game it finds gets recorded once, the day we first see it — published or not, good or not. This page is what those records add up to: 3,271 games over 53 days, and what became of them.

3,271

games recorded

233

ever published here

92%

still up a week later

453

preserved in the Wayback Machine

First sighting Saturday, July 18, 2026 · latest Tuesday, September 8, 2026.

What happens to them

Every recorded game is re-checked at 7, 30, 90, 180 and 365 days after first sighting — a handful of requests per game, forever. Of 2,530 games that have reached their one-week check, 197 were already gone: the URL no longer answers. That is roughly one in 13, in seven days.

Longer milestones are filling in as the census ages:

A dead check means the page didn’t load when we asked, not that the game was bad — free hosting lapses, repos get renamed, people move on. It is the ordinary weather of the self-hosted web, and the reason we archive.

Where they live

Deploy host, read from the URL. “Own domain” means someone registered a name for a free browser game.

Where we found them

The source that surfaced each game first. Volume is not merit: itch supplies the most rows, while the GitHub vein — 963 games deployed straight from a repo — supplies nearly every daily pick.

How discovered they were

Of the 963 games we found through a GitHub repository, 706 had zero stars the day we saw them — nobody had clicked. Another 208 sat between one and ten, and 49 had more than ten.

  • 0 stars706 · 73.3%
  • 1–10 stars208 · 21.6%
  • 11+ stars49 · 5.1%

What they were built with

Read off the markers in each game’s HTML when we first see it, for the 364games recorded since we started looking. “canvas” and “dom” mean no engine’s fingerprints were there at all — someone wrote it by hand.

Not in English

Most of what the sweep finds is in English, which says more about where we look than about who is making games. The 192 that aren’t:

Chinese · 79Japanese · 49Korean · 27Cyrillic · 26Thai · 6Arabic · 4Greek · 1

Take the data

The census is public. Three newline-delimited JSON files, appended to daily, no key required:

Use it for anything, credit appreciated. A census entry is a record that a game existed at a URL on a date — it is not a review, a ranking, or a claim that we played it. If you made one of these and would rather not be in the dataset, ask and we’ll remove it, no questions.

Counted from the same sweep that picks today’s game. The 233 that made it into an edition are on the games page.