eieio.games: Silly Multiplayer Web Toys, Explained by the Guy Who Built Them

eieio.games is where Nolen Royalty puts the ridiculous things he builds on the internet: a million checkboxes shared by everyone at once, a website containing every possible UUID, a Pong game played across your browser tabs’ favicons. Then, crucially, he writes up how each one works.

That second half is what makes the site worth bookmarking rather than just clicking once. Plenty of people make web toys. Almost nobody follows them with an honest account of the database that fell over and the fix that finally held.

What is eieio.games?

eieio.games is a one-person studio with a blog attached. Royalty’s stated goal is to make the internet fun, and the projects are built to be shared rather than solved: most of them put strangers in the same space and see what happens.

The famous one is One Million Checkboxes, launched in June 2024. A million checkboxes, one shared state, everyone toggling at once. It went genuinely viral, and the write-ups that followed, on scaling it under a load nobody planned for and on discovering that people had started hiding secret messages in the grid, are better reading than most engineering blogs manage in a year.

The rest of the catalogue runs the same way. Every UUID lets you scroll through all of them, which is a joke that turns into a real technical problem when you try to build it. One Million Chessboards gives the world a million simultaneous games with pieces that wander between boards. Stranger Video puts you on silent video with a random person. GLOBAL CAPS LOCK is a single caps lock key for the entire planet.

What can you do on eieio.games?

• Play the projects directly. Every entry links straight to the live thing, no signup, no install.
• Read the build write-ups, which cover architecture, the specific bug that ate a weekend, and what he would do differently.
• Watch the demo videos for projects that have been retired or that need hardware you do not have.
• Follow a project’s lineage. The posts reference each other, so you can watch ideas from one experiment resurface in the next.
• Dig into the genuinely technical posts, like why SSH sends roughly a hundred packets per keystroke, or running a million-board chess MMO inside a single process.
• Try the weird-platform stuff, including multiplayer snake you connect to over SSH and games running in places games should not run.

Tips to get the most out of it

1. Start with One Million Checkboxes, then immediately read the follow-ups. The project is the hook; the story of what users did to it is the actual payoff.
2. Open the multiplayer ones when other people are around. Shared-state projects are dead rooms at 4am and delightful when a crowd shows up. Send the link to someone before you open it.
3. Read the write-up after playing, not before. Half the pleasure is realising a thing you assumed was trivial required a custom bit array and a lot of swearing.
4. Do not skip the essays. The non-project posts, on effort, on creative work, on not wanting to work, are short and sharper than the usual genre.
5. Check the archive rather than only the front page. Older experiments like the face-tracking games are buried but still funny.
6. Give the SSH ones a go even if you are not a terminal person. It is one command, and connecting to a game over SSH is a small joy.

If you like eieio.games, also try…

• Neal.fun: the other great one-person collection of interactive web toys, with the same craft and a wider range.
• Popcat: pointless collective clicking at global scale, the same shared-button energy as One Million Checkboxes.
• Dear Next Visitor: a tiny stranger-to-stranger experiment in the spirit of Stranger Video.
• monkeys.zip: one absurd premise, taken completely seriously and run live for everyone to watch.

Browse more delightful corners of the web in our Entertainment & Fun collection.