Reverse-engineering Shockwave to save early 2000s web games (Rust/WASM)
Hi HN, When browsers killed NPAPI plugin support, thousands of early 2000s web games were effectively lost to time. Macromedia Shockwave, in particular, was a closed-source, highly complex, and largely undocumented beast. So a few friends and I spent the last two years doing something arguably unhinged: rebuilding the entire Director engine from scratch. Today, we're finally sharing dirplayer-rs. Repo: https://github.com/igorlira/dirplayer-rs We intentionally stayed quiet on this until we had undeniable proof that it was actually possible. With our latest v0.4.1 release,…
Reverse-engineering Shockwave to save early 2000s web games (Rust/WASM) launched on March 8, 2026 with 16 votes, #953 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Dirplayer-rs is an open-source recreation of the Macromedia Shockwave/Director engine built in Rust and WebAssembly. It enables early 2000s web games created with these now-obsolete technologies to run natively in modern browsers. Developed over two years by reverse-engineering the closed-source, undocumented format, the tool features hardware-accelerated graphics and can play complex games like Habbo Hotel and LEGO Junkbot. It is designed for preservationists, game historians, and anyone seeking to recover lost web gaming content.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A web-compatible Shockwave Player emulator written in Rust - igorlira/dirplayer-rs
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, When browsers killed NPAPI plugin support, thousands of early 2000s web games were effectively lost to time. Macromedia Shockwave, in particular, was a closed-source, highly complex, and largely undocumented beast. So a few friends and I spent the last two years doing something arguably unhinged: rebuilding…
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