Metro Games

Metro Games is an 8-bit game player that works entirely offline.

The whole library is inside the app. There is nothing to download after you install it, nothing to sign in to, and nothing to connect to. Open the app on a plane, in a tunnel, in a basement, or in airplane mode straight after a cold install, and it behaves exactly the same as it does on wi-fi — because it never uses the network either way.

BUILT TO BE OPENED AND PLAYED

• Browse the library as a grid of covers, search it as you type, or jump straight to a letter • Star anything you want to come back to, and pick up recent games from the front screen • Play in portrait or landscape, with on-screen controls laid out for thumbs • Save your place, and pick it back up later

BUILT TO FEEL RIGHT

The emulation core is native code, and so is the frame loop, the audio, and the touch handling. Nothing about a button press is routed through a scripting layer, because a frame of input lag is something you can feel in a game that was designed around exact timing.

The picture is drawn at whole-pixel scale, so the art stays sharp and square instead of turning into a smeared approximation of itself. Audio drives the timing, which is what keeps the sound clean and the scrolling smooth on both 60 Hz and 120 Hz screens.

PRIVACY, PLAINLY

• No account, and no sign-in of any kind • No ads • No analytics, no tracking, no advertising identifiers • No data collection — the app has no networking code in it at all

Your favourites, your recent games, and your saves are written to your device and stay there. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere for it to go.