Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderWow, my shitty C++ Rodent's Revenge remake from highschool is there too! I will submit a PR though as I since switched from Sourceforge to Github [1] and now use the MIT license. In any case, great work! Only suggestion I could make is maybe make an "Engine" category for projects like OpenMW? [1] https://github.com/pierreyoda/o2r
Not quite ready to submit this to the list yet, but I've been working on a Quake 3 engine clone from scratch in C# with Bridge.NET, targeting the browser and WebGL. It's been a super fun project so far -- a few days of part-time work and I have levels rendering nearly perfectly and I'm making progress on character model rendering. Repo is at https://github.com/daeken/WebArena and you can see a live version at http://demoseen.com/bridge/ Still a ton to do, but…
I'm not sure that I would call some of these "clones". ioquake3 for example is the community maintained modernized fork of the Quake 3 engine source that id released. You can't do much with it without your own assets (either the original Quake3 assets, the OpenArena assets (that game is what I would call the Quake3 "clone"), or assets from any number of Quake 3 mods (tremulous, urban terror, etc). I think ioquake3 is an example of where open source…
I'm still a bit sour about Square forcing the Chrono Trigger: Resurrection guys to cancel their remake of Chrono Trigger. CT is my favorite game of all time so hearing that this fan project got C&D'd killed me. The screens and the trailers looked awesome, especially considering it was 2004. http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/Crono0.jpg http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/Guardia0.jpg http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/MagusLair2.jpg http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 6
- Total points
- 1658
- Total comments
- 395
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-06-01 | Open source remakes of games you're still lovingFirst breakout | murkt | 208 | 82 |
| 2013-05-27 | Open Source Game Clones | piranha | 219 | 81 |
| 2014-08-15 | Open Source Game Clones | adamnemecek | 121 | 28 |
| 2015-05-11 | Show HN: Open Source Game Clones | galapago | 3 | 3 |
| 2017-03-03 | Open Source Game Clones – open-source remakes of great games in one place | drahen | 1 | 0 |
| 2017-10-13 | Open Source Game ClonesHall induction | madc | 309 | 78 |
| 2019-06-06 | Open Source Game ClonesBest thread | polm23 | 576 | 96 |
| 2021-05-24 | Open Source Game Clones | bminusl | 2 | 0 |
| 2022-08-11 | Open Source Game Clones | latexr | 62 | 0 |
| 2023-12-27 | Open Source Game ClonesLatest 20+ point return | pabs3 | 150 | 26 |
| 2025-09-09 | Open Source Game Clones | klaussilveira | 7 | 1 |
