Destroy Any Website: a browser demo where a stickman tears any page apart

On 28 September Sprite Fusion released Destroy Any Website, a free browser demo in which the visitor types any web address, the page loads in a frame, and a stickman character walks across it, shoots at it and blows it apart. The Show HN post collected 137 points and 34 comments within a day.

How it works

Controls follow a small platformer: A and D run, Space jumps (a tap flips the character, holding it makes him fly), S drops him down, the left mouse button shoots, the right one throws a grenade, keys 1 to 7 switch weapons, Esc pauses and Tab opens the scoreboard. The interface shows health, score and the share of the page already destroyed, and offers a dark and a light theme.

Multiplayer is built in: a player creates a room, invites others with a link, and the host picks the site everyone destroys in that round. In the Hacker News thread the maker said he had put deep care into everything, from the multiplayer setup to game-feel; his phrase “DO multiplayer setup” was read by commenters as Cloudflare Durable Objects, the stateful server-side primitive commonly used for real-time rooms.

The site also ships an embed snippet: copy the code and visitors to your own pages can smash your site instead. In the thread people asked how the visible edges of a third-party page become a playable stage; one described his own attempt, which generated platforms from the DOM and CSS and later considered edge detection over a page image.

What it is for

Destroy Any Website is mainly a toy and, at the same time, a demo for the pixel art and tilemap tools Sprite Fusion sells to game developers; one commenter read it exactly that way, as an advertisement for the product. The game itself is free in the browser and ships with a Wikipedia page as a demo target.

The thread compared it with Page Rage, published on Hacker News about two weeks earlier. Page Rage’s author, alexreardon, wrote that Destroy Any Website makes its own distinct creative and gameplay choices and is not a low quality clone; in his words the resemblance could come from inspiration or from simultaneous discovery.

Limits

The game does not run on mobile: the site itself tells visitors to use a laptop. Not every page loads either. One commenter reported that chatgpt.com answers with a 403, because it refuses to be framed. Another complaint concerned device detection: a narrow, tall browser window or a long monitor was taken for a phone and the game refused to start.