NeoNetrek
modernizing the internet's first team game (1988)
Details
- External ID
- 47282303
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- NeoNetrek
- Website domain
- neonetrek.com
- Launched
- March 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 7
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4108241082410824
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- modernized version of classic multiplayer game
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While browser frontends and WebSocket servers are standard, reimplementing the intricate Netrek 16-player real-time network protocol with authoritative physics, lag compensation, and game logic is complex.
What it would actually take: Requires an authoritative game server in C/Go/Rust communicating with an HTML5 Canvas/WebGL client via WebSockets. The primary hurdle is reverse-engineering or adhering to the legacy Netrek protocol, handling real-time multi-ship physics, weapon collisions, and client-side interpolation without jitter over variable network latencies. Expertise in real-time multiplayer networking and reverse-engineering 1980s network protocols is needed.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 87 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #59 of 88 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 119 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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