Page Invaders - Turn Any Web Page into an Arcade Shooter

Every web page is a level. Page Invaders is a new Chrome extension from DataOcean that drops a retro starship onto the page you are reading. Click the toolbar icon, hold Space, and watch the page come apart. Letters crack out of words. Logos split into jagged chunks. Buttons, boxes, and images take craters one hit at a time. Every piece is a real rigid body: it tumbles, bounces, piles up on the floor, and breaks again when it lands hard.

Why We Built It

Most browser games live in their own tab. We wanted a game that uses the web itself as the playing field. The news site you read every morning, a search results page, a long product listing: each one has a different shape, a different mix of text, boxes, and images, and so each one plays differently.

The second goal was to make the destruction feel real. A shot does not just hide an element. It carves the pixels near the impact out of the page, and the rest falls as a solid chunk with its own weight, spin, and sound.

How It Plays

Click the Page Invaders icon on any page. A ship appears at the bottom of the screen and patrols on its own. Use the arrow keys or A and D to move, and hold Space to fire.

Page Invaders ship at the bottom of a Google search page, ready to fire

Each shot carves the letters near the impact out of a word, and the rest of the word after the impact falls as one chunk. A box, a border, or an image stays in place and loses one irregular crater per shot. Pieces show the raw page pixels, so a fallen chunk of a logo still looks like that logo.

Shots carving the Google logo apart, with pieces tumbling down the page

Nothing on the page actually changes. Press Escape or click the icon again, and the page is back exactly as it was.

Weapons and Power-ups

Capsules drop from some hits and fall through the bottom of the page. Move the ship under one to catch it.

Rapid Fire: a faster shot cadence for 12 seconds.
Spread Shot: five lines 10 degrees apart for 12 seconds.
Weapon swap: switch between Ice Lance tracers, Ember Cannon plasma with a wide bite, and fast Void Darts.
Nuke: a screen-clearing charge. Hold up to two, and press N to fire one.

The Ember Cannon firing plasma orbs across a page

A nuke shockwave expanding across the page

Time Attack

Press T to start Time Attack: 60 seconds, a live score on the board, and an end screen with the score and the saved best. Every material has its own sound to help you find the high-value targets: letters crack, boxes thud, borders clank, and images ping.

Time Attack mode with the clock running and Void Darts in flight

Controls

Key	Action
Left / Right or A / D	Move the ship
Space	Fire. Held fire shoots at a random cadence
N	Fire a nuke charge
T	Start Time Attack
R	Reset the page and the score
M	Mute or unmute the sound
Escape or the toolbar icon	Stop the game and restore the page

The move, fire, and mute keys can be changed on the options page. The options page also sets the dust amount, how long pieces stay after they land, and the volume.

Under the Hood

Page Invaders is a Manifest V3 extension. The game runs on a canvas overlay above the page, and the physics come from Matter.js, an open-source 2D rigid body engine. The content script reads the layout of the page, finds the words, boxes, and images under each shot, copies the pixels of the piece that breaks off, and hands that piece to the physics engine as a rigid body.

Large boxes with a lot of content inside are treated as panels: their background and border stay in place, and only the content inside breaks. Live canvases, such as charts and games, keep running under the overlay, and a shot leaves a short-lived scar on the drawn content instead of removing it.

Safe and Private

The game runs only on the tab where you click the icon. It cannot read or touch other tabs.
No data collection, no accounts, no ads, and no network requests.
Your settings and your best score stay on your device.
All code ships in the package. There is no remote code.