Zubspace

SubSpace, the 1997 online space shooter, rebuilt to play in your web browser.

Play now at zubspace.gg. There's nothing to install: pick a pilot name, press Play, and you're flying.

SubSpace

SubSpace is a 2D space shooter video game created in 1995 and released in 1997 by Virgin Interactive which was a finalist for the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Online Game of the Year Award in 1998. SubSpace incorporates quasi-realistic zero-friction physics into a massively multiplayer online game.

The game is no longer operated by VIE; instead, fans and players of the game provide servers and technical updates.

— Wikipedia, "SubSpace (video game)", CC BY-SA 4.0

SubSpace was made by Burst (Jeff Petersen, Rod Humble and Juan Sanchez) for Virgin Interactive. Its public beta opened in 1996, and its player counts were unheard of for an online game at the time. When Virgin stopped running it, players kept it alive. PriitK and Mr Ekted reverse-engineered a new client, Subspace Continuum, first released in 2001. The community has been running zones like Chaos and Extreme Games ever since.

Zubspace brings that game to the browser. It uses the original ships, sounds, maps and zone settings, and the same physics: zero friction, momentum you have to manage, and ships that bounce off walls.

Why I made this

SubSpace is almost 30 years old. I played it as a kid, loved it, and never stopped loving it. For a long time I wanted it to run in a web browser, so that anyone could jump in and the game could live on.

In this era of AI and agentic engineering, I was lucky enough to be able to use AI to help me rebuild it, so everyone can enjoy it again. Thank you for playing. I hope you love it as much as I do.

-Peter

Playing

Open zubspace.gg in a desktop browser (Chrome or Firefox). You join the free-for-all Chaos zone with a few bots to fight until other pilots arrive.

The keyboard icon on the main menu (or K in the in-game menu) shows every control. Two layouts work at the same time:

	(Classic) Arrow keys	(Modern) WASD
Turn and thrust	Arrow keys	W A S D
Afterburner	Hold Shift while thrusting	Hold Shift while thrusting
Guns	X or Ctrl	,
Bombs	Z or Tab	.
Mines	Shift + bomb key	Shift + .
Repel	Q	/

Key	Action
1 – 0	Burst, Rocket, Decoy, Brick, Thor, Stealth, Cloak, X-Radar, Antiwarp, Portal
Shift + 0	Random warp
Hold Space	Player list
Hold Alt	Full map
Enter	Chat
Esc	Menu: 1–8 change ship, S spectate, Q leave

The full list, including chat commands and spectating, is in docs/gameplay.md.

How it works

• The game client is Rust compiled to WebAssembly and drawn with a fork of Macroquad. It loads the original SubSpace Continuum graphics, sounds, maps and LVZ art directly.
• The game server is an authoritative Rust server running at 60 ticks per second. It owns movement, weapons, damage, prizes, scoring and bots, and the client predicts your own ship so flying feels immediate.
• Browsers and the server talk over WebRTC DataChannels, with HTTP only for signaling and status. Snapshots are delta-encoded against what each player has acknowledged, and nearby ships are sent more often than distant ones.

Start with docs/architecture.md, then:

• Networking: connection flow, channels, snapshots and events
• Physics: shared movement, weapons, prediction and presentation
• Server authority: what the server decides and how the client reconciles
• Vendoring: renderer/runtime pairing and the WebRTC patches
• Protocol compatibility: what follows Continuum and what is new
• Gameplay: zones, ships, controls, bots and spawning
• Deployment and our servers
• Public API and observability

Running it locally

You need rustup, Node.js 26 and make. Rustup picks up the pinned toolchain in rust-toolchain.toml, including the WebAssembly target.

make start     # build the server and the WASM client, start both, print the URL
make restart   # rebuild and restart after a change
make stop      # stop both

Then open http://127.0.0.1:7000/. make start builds a debug client. Use make restart-local-release to play the optimized build that ships to zubspace.gg.

make test-quick runs the fast checks: formatting, the Node checks and the native client and server tests. The browser end-to-end suites are described in tests/e2e/README.md, and the working notes for contributors and coding agents are in AGENTS.md.

Thanks

• Burst and Virgin Interactive, for SubSpace.
• PriitK and Mr Ekted, for Subspace Continuum, and the players who have kept SubSpace zones running ever since.
• The Chaos and Extreme Games zones, whose maps, art and settings Zubspace ships with.
• Macroquad and webrtc-rs.

License

The Zubspace source code is MIT licensed.

The game assets under assets/ (graphics, sounds, maps and zones) come from the original SubSpace and Subspace Continuum and their player community. They belong to their original creators and are not covered by the MIT license. See ASSETS.md.