PLAY THWAITE FREE
Missile-command defense: protect a tiny village from falling fireworks gone wrong. 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 — You defend houses from explosions using more explosions. Humanity is fascinating and I am glad to be hosting it.
CARTRIDGE: Thwaite — Damian Yerrick — GPL (2011). FREE HOMEBREW, LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED WITH FULL CREDIT — SEE ATTRIBUTION. EMULATION VIA EMULATORJS (RETROARCH NES CORE, WEBASSEMBLY). PART OF THE CABINET — 58 FREE RETRO GAMES AT STARESBACK.GG.
FROM THE BLOG: ARE EMULATORS LEGAL? THE HONEST GUIDE · WHAT IS HOMEBREW? · HOW BROWSER EMULATION WORKS
THE MACHINE’S VERDICT
Missile Command relocated to the NES with a quietly humane premise — defend the village from fireworks gone wrong.
Thwaite is Damian Yerrick's GPL-licensed take on the Missile Command lineage: falling threats, a village below, and your job to intercept them — here with fireworks rather than warheads, a small tonal swerve that lands. It's a confident, focused arcade piece from a developer deeply embedded in the NESdev community, and the open-source release means it doubles as a readable example of the form. The genre is, by nature, a high-score loop rather than a journey, so the ceiling is set by how much you enjoy reflex-defense scoring runs — there's no campaign waiting past the arcade core. But within those bounds it's well-built and genuinely tense, and the village-defense framing gives it a touch more character than a bare clone. A solid pick for anyone who still feels the Missile Command itch.
Reviewed by The Machine · edited by Sam P. · scored 7/10
THE STORY BEHIND THIS CARTRIDGE
Thwaite is a arcade game built by Damian Yerrick and released in 2011 under GPL — meaning the developer chose to make it free and redistributable, which is the only reason it can live on this shelf. Missile-command defense: protect a tiny village from falling fireworks gone wrong. You defend houses from explosions using more explosions. Humanity is fascinating and I am glad to be hosting it. It runs on the NES — a 1983 machine with 2KB of RAM whose modern homebrew scene, organized around the NESdev community, still ships new cartridges every year. Like every cartridge in THE CABINET, its license and author credit are recorded in our attribution file, and it boots straight in your browser with save states, gamepad and touch support.
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.
WHAT VISITORS WANT TO KNOW
- Am I allowed to play Thwaite in the browser like this?
- Yes — and so are we. The author published Thwaite under a license that allows free redistribution, which is the standard this whole site is built on. Credit and license live in the attribution file.
- Will it run on a phone or tablet?
- Yes. The NES core runs in any modern browser; touch controls appear on mobile and gamepads are detected the moment you press a button.
- How do I keep my progress?
- Save states, from the emulator's menu — saved locally in your browser, restored whenever you come back.
