A small studio with a very specific obsession
GamerSpotter is 5 people in Vancouver who think a browser game should load before you change your mind about playing it.
The tab you open on a coffee break
In 2021 our founder went looking for a five-minute game to play between meetings and found the same thing everyone finds: a page of thumbnails, four advertising banners, a cookie wall with no reject button, and a game that took thirty seconds to load and then did not respond to a touchscreen. It seemed like a solvable problem.
So we solved it the boring way. We write the games ourselves. Each one is a single HTML page with its own canvas and its own small script, deliberately kept tiny — the largest game in the catalogue is smaller than one photograph on an average news site. Nothing loads from a third party. There are no adverts, no interstitials and no launcher. You click a game, it starts.
What "curated" actually means here
It means we say no a lot. Every idea goes through the same three gates before it gets a page on this site, and most ideas do not clear all three:
- Is it clear in ten seconds? If a new player needs a tutorial longer than three lines, the design is wrong, not the player.
- Does it work with a thumb? Keyboard controls are easy. A game that is genuinely comfortable one-handed on a phone is not, and that is the harder bar.
- Is it still fun on the fifth run? Novelty is cheap. We keep a build in internal testing for a week and watch whether anyone voluntarily plays it again.
The result is a catalogue of 16 games rather than a catalogue of thousands, growing by 2–3 a month. Every one of them is finished. None of them is a placeholder waiting for a licence deal.
How we test
We keep a shelf of borrowed and second-hand devices: two Android phones, an old iPhone, a tablet with a cracked screen, an eight-year-old laptop and a school Chromebook. A build has to hold a steady frame rate on the Chromebook before it ships, because if it runs there it runs anywhere. Touch controls are tested with one hand, standing up, which is how most people actually play.
Accessibility gets the same pass. Every game is playable with the keyboard alone, focus outlines are left visible, colour is never the only way information is conveyed, and anyone who has asked their system for reduced motion gets a calmer version of the interface.
What we do not do
We do not take payments, sell items or run adverts. There is nothing to buy on this site and no way to spend money on it. Scores are points on your own device — no purchases, no virtual currency, nothing of value changing hands in either direction, and there never will be. That is a design decision, not a phase.
We also do not collect more than we need. There is no account system, no tracking pixel and no analytics running unless you have explicitly turned it on. Details are in our Privacy Policy, which is written in plain English on purpose.
Everyone who touches a build
Five people, one shared spreadsheet of player requests, and a standing argument about difficulty curves.
Marisol Reyes
Founder & Curator
Started the site in 2021 after one too many "free games" pages that were mostly pop-ups. Plays every build to completion before it goes live, and has rejected far more than she has published.
Devon Achterberg
Lead Developer
Writes the games and keeps them small. His rule is that nothing ships above 60 kB or without working touch controls, which is why the catalogue loads on hotel wifi.
Priya Raghunath
Game Design
Tunes difficulty curves and rewrites tutorials until they fit in three lines. Responsible for the fact that Stack Tower gives width back on a perfect drop.
Colin Fraser
Quality & Devices
Tests every release on a wall of borrowed phones, an eight-year-old laptop and a school Chromebook. If it stutters on the Chromebook, it goes back to Devon.
Aiko Tremblay
Community & Support
Reads every message that comes through the contact form and answers most of them the same day. Keeps the list of player-requested games that decides what gets built next.
Five years, sixteen games
2021 — first build
Snake Garden went live as a single HTML file on a borrowed domain. It is still the most played game in the catalogue.
2023 — touch first
We rewrote every existing game to treat touch as the primary input rather than an afterthought. Play time roughly doubled.
2024 — the Chromebook rule
A reader told us their school laptop could not run our racer. We bought one like it and made it the benchmark for every release since.
2026 — 16 games
Four categories, 41,600+ players a month, and a request list long enough to keep us busy into next year.
Tell us what to build next
Our roadmap is basically the contact form. If you want a game that is not here, say so — several titles in the catalogue exist because someone asked.