Cursor Arcade

Minimalist arcade classics inside your editor. Snake. 2048. Blocks. Minesweeper. Pong. Tic-Tac-Toe. Head Soccer. Capitalist. Monochrome. Keyboard-first. Zero dependencies. One keystroke away.

Why

You spent three hours rebasing. Compile just failed. The linter is screaming. You don't want to alt-tab to a browser and burn the next twenty minutes on r/games — you want three minutes, something your hands already know, and a fresh brain when you come back.

Cursor Arcade gives you eight games at one keystroke, all rendered in the same restrained black-and-white grammar as the rest of your IDE. No animations that distract. No accounts. No telemetry. No web requests. Close the panel and they disappear — your best scores don't.

The Games

Each game tracks a persistent high score. Every game is keyboard-native. Every game fits the same monochrome grid so nothing looks out of place next to your code.

Install

From the marketplace

• VS Code / VSCodium — install from the Visual Studio Marketplace or search Cursor Arcade in the Extensions pane.
• Cursor / other OSS VS Code forks — install from Open VSX or search Cursor Arcade in Cursor's Extensions pane.

Manual (VSIX)

Download the latest .vsix from the releases page, then:

Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P  →  Extensions: Install from VSIX…

Quick start

Hit Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P and run one of:

From the main menu, press 1–8 to pick a game. Esc always takes you back. Space pauses. R restarts. That's the whole shape of it.

Controls

Snake

2048

Blocks

Minesweeper

Pong

• 1P mode pits you against a predictive CPU with four difficulty tiers (Easy / Normal / Hard / Insane).
• 2P hotseat: W/S for left paddle (P1), ↑/↓ for right paddle (P2).
• First to 5 / 7 / 11 / 21 points (configurable). Deflection angle depends on where the ball hits your paddle; ball speed ramps up every rally.
• Consecutive 1P wins against each CPU tier are tracked as a streak.

Tic-Tac-Toe

• 1P vs CPU with three difficulty tiers: Easy (random), Normal (mostly smart, slightly fallible), Hard (full minimax — perfect play, you can only draw or lose).
• 2P hotseat — pass the keyboard. Players alternate who moves first across rounds.
• Total wins per CPU tier are tracked as a high score.

Head Soccer

• Ground kick: slam low, arcing shots.
• Air kick: jump + kick for volleys and scissor kicks.
• Power shot: press power once your meter is full, then your next kick is devastating.
• Power-ups drop mid-match: Fire (next kick burns), Ice (next kick freezes opponent), Giant (head grows), Multiball (extra balls, extra chaos).
• First to 3 goals, or most goals when the match timer runs out.

Capitalist

An AdVenture Capitalist-style idle tycoon that plays nicely in the background while you code.

• 30 businesses across 3 planets — Earth (Lemonade → Oil), Moon (Moon Shoes → Giant Laser), Mars (Red Dirt → Terrorformer).
• Managers automate each business once hired.
• ~100 cash upgrades and ~25 angel upgrades with per-business and all-business profit multipliers, plus angel-effectiveness boosts.
• Business milestones at 25 / 50 / 100 / 200 / 300 / 400 owned halve cycle time and multiply revenue (x3 × x3 × x3 × x2 × x2 × x2).
• Angel investors grant a permanent +2 % per-angel profit boost on reset. Reset pays out floor(150 · √(lifetime / 1e15)) new angels minus those already owned.
• Offline earnings accumulate for up to 12 hours at 25 % efficiency — close the panel and come back richer.
• Autosaves every 10 seconds to your VS Code globalState. No cloud, no account.

Features

• Eight polished games in one extension — no tab-switching, no context-switching.
• Monochrome throughout — designed to live next to your code without yelling.
• Persistent high scores per game, per mode, per difficulty.
• Worldwide daily Snake challenge — a seeded board that changes every UTC day.
• Hold + ghost + 7-bag randomizer in Blocks, because that's the right way to do it.
• No telemetry. No network. No dependencies. The whole extension is one TypeScript file and a few hundred lines of vanilla JS in a webview.
• Dark & light themes that follow your vibe.
• Esc always goes back, Space always pauses. Muscle memory stays yours.

Roadmap

Ideas welcome via issues.

• [x] Pong
• [ ] Breakout
• [ ] Wordle-style 5-letter puzzle with local wordlist
• [ ] Solitaire
• [ ] Sokoban with a built-in level editor
• [ ] Per-game leaderboards (opt-in, local file only)
• [ ] Touch input

Design notes

The entire design language is: one font family, three greys, no drop shadows, no gradients, no easing that you can visibly see. Every time you're tempted to add a color, add contrast instead. Every time you're tempted to animate, ask whether it would survive on a Kindle.

The webview is pure HTML/CSS/JS — no React, no bundler, no build step beyond tsc for the extension host. This is because every extra dependency is another thing to update, another attack surface, and another reason for the extension to be 20 MB.

Development

git clone https://github.com/flancast90/cursor-arcade-games
cd cursor-arcade-games
npm install
npm run compile        # or: npm run watch

Open the folder in VS Code / Cursor and press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host. Then Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P → Arcade: Open Arcade.

Adding a new game

Every game is a single file in media/games/ that registers itself:

(function () {
  const R = window.CursorArcade;
  R.games.mygame = {
    create(ctx) {
      return new MyGame(ctx);
    },
  };
  class MyGame {
    constructor({ host, api, meta, options }) { /* ... */ }
    onKey(e)       { /* keyboard input */ }
    destroy()      { /* cleanup */ }

    // Optional:
    togglePause()  {}
    restart()      {}
    buildSettings(container) {}
    onContextMenu(e) {}
  }
})();

Then:

1. Add a metadata entry to GAME_META in media/arcade.js.
2. Add a <script> tag for your new file in media/index.html.
3. Pass its URI from src/extension.ts.
4. Add commands in package.json if you want direct launchers.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full checklist.

Contributing

Pull requests welcome. Bugs, ideas, and gloriously pedantic UX nitpicks are all equally welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

If you're shipping a new game, please keep the aesthetic monochrome — we'll merge anything reasonable that stays inside the design constraints.

License

MIT. Do whatever you want. A link back is nice but not required.

Credits

• 2048 — original concept by Gabriele Cirulli, MIT-licensed.
• Snake — variants inspired by Google's search-engine easter egg and the slither.io lineage.
• Blocks — tetromino stacking is the mechanic; this implementation is independent and not affiliated with Tetris Holding.
• Minesweeper — Microsoft's 1990 classic; the underlying game is in the public domain.
• Pong — Atari's 1972 arcade classic; the underlying game is in the public domain.
• Tic-Tac-Toe — folk game predating recorded history; "Hard" mode is a textbook minimax solver. Public domain.
• Head Soccer — big-headed soccer is a long-running flash/mobile genre (D1, BGL, etc.); this implementation is independent, with custom physics and a monochrome coat of paint.
• Capitalist — inspired by Hyper Hippo's AdVenture Capitalist (2014). Business lists, coefficients, milestone halvings, and the angel formula are modelled after the official wiki; all art and code here are original.