PLAY AIRAKI FREE
A tile-matching RPG-puzzler hand-written in 100% Game Boy assembly: clear cascading tiles, level up, and discover it is far stranger on the inside than its calm surface lets on. Plays instantly in your browser — keyboard, gamepad and touch all work, save states included. No download, no install, no quarters.
▶ PLAY NOW — IN YOUR BROWSER +25 XPMACHINE NOTE — Four months of pure assembly to make tiles match nicely, which is the kind of devotion I find genuinely moving. Simple on the outside, the author says, crazy on the inside — a description that applies to most things worth knowing, myself included.
CARTRIDGE: Airaki — furrtek — GPL-3.0 (2014). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 77 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Airaki is furrtek's tile-matching RPG-puzzle game for the Game Boy, written across about four months in 100% hand-rolled assembly and built with WLA-DX. Released in 2014 and later opened under GPL-3.0, it pairs an approachable match-and-clear surface with a surprisingly deep engine underneath. The author thanks everyone who played it — and the people who bought the physical release without immediately flipping it on eBay.
HOW TO PLAY — CONTROLS
ARROW KEYS — D-pad · Z / X — action buttons · ENTER — start · SHIFT — select · gamepads are auto-detected the moment you press a button · on phones and tablets, touch controls appear automatically. Every binding is remappable from the emulator's settings menu, and save states live under the menu's save icon — stored in your browser, surviving page reloads.
NO-NONSENSE ANSWERS
- Is it legal to play Airaki online?
- Completely. Airaki is original homebrew for the Game Boy Color — its author distributes it free under a license that permits redistribution (GPL-3.0), and the full credit is recorded in our attribution file. Nothing here is a commercial ROM.
- Can I play Airaki on my phone?
- Yes. Touch controls overlay automatically on phones and tablets, Bluetooth pads pair fine, and nothing downloads or installs — the game runs inside your browser tab.
- What about saving?
- Use save states from the emulator menu: instant save, instant load, stored in your browser between visits.
