Play with news headlines in classic video games.
Play with the latest headlines from your favorite news sites.
Break the wall of today's headlines brick by brick. Every block you smash is a real story.
Stack the news feed. Clear a line and read the story you just completed.
Waves of breaking news descend on you. Shoot down the headlines before they land.
News video games is an online small arcade where every machine runs on the news. Each game takes an arcade retro classic you already know how to play and swaps its pieces for today's real headlines, read live from the RSS feed of the newspaper you choose.
That single change is enough to make the games different every day. The wall you break in Arkanews and the pieces that fall in Newstris are built the moment you press play, out of whatever the world is publishing right now. A heavy news day and a quiet Sunday do not play the same, and no two games are ever built from the same front page.
The headlines are not decoration. Every brick and every block still points at the story it came from, so a headline that catches your eye is one click from the full article on the publisher's own site. All the games pay you more for reading than for playing well — being curious about a headline scores higher than clearing it — because the idea is to skim the day's news in something that feels like an arcade cabinet instead of a feed.
Today's front page is stacked into a wall of coloured bricks and you take it apart with a ball and a paddle. Breaking a brick with the ball is worth 300 points, opening its article 1,000, and clearing the whole wall 3,000. A busy news day gives you a dense, colourful wall; a quiet one leaves you a short game. Read more about Arkanews or play it now.
Here the headlines fall instead, one word per cell, and you fit them together before they reach the top. A three-word headline drops as a neat little square; a long one is an awkward slab you will rotate twice and still regret. Because irregular pieces make a perfect row almost impossible, you decide before you start how many gaps a row may still have: leave it at three and the game is generous, drop it to zero and you are playing strict Tetris rules with pieces that were never designed for them. Play Newstris.
Waves of breaking news descending on you, to be shot down before they land. Still in the works.
Every game starts the same way: you pick the newspaper you want to play with. Ten outlets are ready out of the box, covering world news, business, technology and entertainment.
That list is only a starting point. Each game has a website editor where you can add any RSS feed you like — your local paper, a niche blog, a sports site, a feed in your own language — and it becomes a new button on the start screen. Your list lives in your own browser, so the game remembers it next time without ever asking you for an account.
Everything runs in the browser, on a phone as well as on a computer: nothing to download, nothing to sign up for, no paywall. The interface is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hindi, and the headlines are always in the language of the source you picked.