Alderhoard is a retro arcade browser game. You walk a small valley, earn your way into an arcade, and play the cabinets you unlock. Everything in it, every game, every menu, every fight, is played with four arrow keys and the space bar. There is no sixth key anywhere.
Fact sheet
- Title
- Alderhoard
- Developer
- Scott Covert, working as 5 Keys Lab. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.
- Platform
- Any modern web browser, desktop or laptop. No install, no account, no plugin, no download.
- Controls
- Four arrow keys and the space bar. Depth comes from tapping versus holding, never from more keys.
- Status
- In development and publicly playable. First built 13 July 2026.
- Price
- Free to start, and four cabinets, the Warlord quest, forty Stonebreaker levels and ten 3D Waka levels stay free. See what is free.
- Technology
- HTML and canvas. No engine, no framework, no store page.
- Contact
- [email protected]
What is free, and what is not
Alderhoard has a free tier, and it is a real one. It is not a demo, it does not expire, and it does not ask for an account or an email address.
Always free, and this does not change:
- Four arcade cabinets, the ones standing out in the open in the valley.
- The Warlord quest, start to finish.
- At least forty Stonebreaker levels.
- At least ten 3D Waka levels.
Those are floors, not totals. They can rise. They will not fall.
Not free, eventually: what lies past that floor, and cabinets that graduate out of the opening set. Some games in here are substantial enough to be sold on their own, and are likely to be.
The boss at the end of the free walls stays in the free tier on purpose. Selling the ending is a different thing from selling more of the game, and only one of them is fair.
None of that is switched on today. Nothing in Alderhoard is behind a payment right now. The structure exists ahead of time because retro-fitting one onto a hundred levels and a pile of shared links is a far worse job than building it early.
The valley is not going to be finished
This is worth saying plainly, because it reads as a flaw and is actually the design. Alderhoard is not a game that ships once and stops. The valley has grown every month since July and will keep growing; cabinets get added, renamed, retired, and occasionally pulled out to stand on their own. A screen that exists today may be something else next month, and the dev log says so when it happens.
What makes it different
Five keys, everywhere
Four arrows and a space. The same key means different things in different games: a sword in the valley, a jump on a sphere, a net on an ice moon.
The valley is the key ring
The arcade is the prize, not the menu. Repair a hoist and a cabinet lights up. Beat the Warlord and another opens.
Made for people who fed these machines quarters
Tributes rather than clones, built on the idea that those games would be different if somebody had simply kept going.
Built in the open
Every decision, dead end and abandoned week is written down publicly in the dev log, including the ones that were mistakes.
Images and video
Screenshots, dated build pictures and level art are all on the site and free for press use with credit to Scott Covert.
- Screenshots
- Alderhoard in pictures, dated from July onwards, showing how the art changed
- Every level, one direct link each, for jumping straight to anything worth filming
The short version, for a paragraph
Alderhoard is a free-to-start retro arcade browser game by Scott Covert, a sixty-year-old solo developer in Peterborough, Ontario, who had never made a game before July 2026. It is played entirely with four arrow keys and the space bar. You walk a small valley, unlock arcade cabinets by doing things in it, and play tributes to the games of the early eighties. It is built in public, it is not finished, and the valley is not meant to be.
Contact
Scott Covert, [email protected]. Review access is not required. The game is open in a browser at alderhoard.com, there are no keys to request, and every level has a direct link.