DAN-BALL started on April 16, 2006. Twenty years later, it is still updating games. That alone puts it in a rare category of browser-game sites that did not simply survive the death of Flash, social platforms, app stores, and several generations of Web fashion. It kept shipping.
The site is managed by three people identified on its profile page: ha55ii, a game programmer; tylor, a web programmer; and otascube, an app game programmer. Their catalog is wonderfully difficult to summarize because the games often sound like experiments somebody accidentally made playable.
There is Powder Game, a falling-particle simulation where players can combine materials and build contraptions. Liquid Webtoy turns fluid simulation into a browser toy. Planet simulation plays with gravity. Compasses lets hundreds of little magnets interact. Earth Editor builds worlds from dots. 100bit is a shared drawing surface that can replay the history of how an image was made. There are also action RPGs, puzzle games, hamsters, rockets, pandas, mines, ray tracing, and enough stick figures to staff a very cheap war.
The update history is almost as valuable as the games themselves. It stretches back to the site’s launch date and records a constant stream of small releases: Rockets 1.0 on April 16, 2006; Compasses 1.0 that August; SAND MOJI 1.0 in September; Powder Game 1.0 in April 2007. The same log continues into 2026 with current versions of Stick Ranger 2 and mobile-app maintenance.
That continuity matters. Browser games are usually discussed as a dead era bounded by plugin technology. DAN-BALL shows another path: keep rebuilding, porting, maintaining, and letting the site remain the center of gravity instead of abandoning it for whatever distribution platform is fashionable this year.
The comments are still active too. People show up in 2026 talking about games they played as children, sharing creations, requesting ports, and celebrating the site’s twentieth anniversary. There is an actual community thread running from mid-2000s Web games into current browsers and phones.
The design has changed enough to keep working but not enough to erase its ancestry. There are still giant access counters, plain navigation, update logs, individual game pages, and a sense that the homepage is a directory rather than a marketing funnel.
For a webmaster, that may be the most interesting part. DAN-BALL did not need to become a giant platform. It just needed to remain a place people knew how to return to.