NeoNetrek – modernizing the internet's first team game (1988)

Netrek is a multiplayer space battle game from 1988–89, widely considered the first Internet team game. It predates commercial online gaming by years, ran passionate leagues for decades, and is still technically alive — but getting a server up has always required real effort, and there’s been no easy way to just play it in a browser. NeoNetrek is my attempt to change that: Server: Based on the original vanilla Netrek C server, modernized with simpler configuration and containerized for one-command cloud deployment. There are ready-made templates for Fly.io and Railway, and public servers already running in LAX, IAD, NRT, and LHR. Anyone can self-host using the deploy templates in the GitHub org. Client: A new 3D browser-based client — no downloads, no plugins, connects via WebSocket. I built it starting from Andrew Sillers’ html5-netrek (github.com/apsillers/html5-netrek) as a foundation and took it in a new direction with 3D rendering. Site: neonetrek.com covers lore, factions, ship classes, ranks, and an Academy to ease the notoriously steep learning curve. A significant portion of the code and content was developed with Claude as a coding partner, which felt fitting for a project about preserving internet history. GitHub org: https://github.com/neonetrek Play now: https://neonetrek.com