I want to know who is the best

I am a gamer. I have been playing since I was a kid, and I am genuinely angry about one thing that simply does not exist.

Until now there was no place I could go to see who is the best at a game. Not at one particular game: at any game. I could not look up who is on top and then challenge them. I could not fight my way up. I could not say: this is my record, and it now stands in the world.

Until now. The place is here: the Hall of Fame. One table across every game that joins. Boom.

And the mad part is that all of it is digital. Every score is a number in a database. We have better and more open data on global electricity production than we have on video games. There is no technical reason for this. Nobody ever went and did it.

The problem is called a garden wall

Steam has leaderboards. Roblox has leaderboards. The Game Center on your iPhone has leaderboards. itch.io has none. Newgrounds has had them since 1995.

Every one of those lists stops exactly at the edge of its own platform.

I find all of these platforms interesting and I want to replace none of them. But they are gardens sealed off from each other with walls around them, and for a player who just wants to know where he stands, that is boring. My record in one game knows nothing about my record in another. I exist fifteen times, in fifteen silos, and nowhere as the player I actually am.

What I actually want

One place to go. And there I see, immediately:

• What is being played the most right now?
• Who are the movers and shakers? Which players took the most hall-of-fame spots this week?
• Which games are new?
• And, my favourite: where has a record stood untouched for months?

That last one exists nowhere else. Every platform on earth shows you the top. None shows you its age. And that is exactly the information a hunter waits for. A record nobody has beaten in eight months is not a statistic. It is an invitation.

I want to be a highscore hunter. I want a verified record I can brag about. I want to become part of gaming history, even as number 47 in a game nobody has ever heard of.

That is the core of it: give every gaming nerd on earth the chance to be the best at some game. Or at least to stand on a list forever.

The other half: the people who build

As kids we sat around imagining games we could never build. Now you can. And not just a chosen few: every kid on the planet, and every adult who always wanted to.

Those people want to know whether anybody plays their game. And what the world gets out of it.

Picture it. You put your game together yesterday. Ten people find it. Would it not be great if those ten people had a little highscore battle in it? If you could see what score the world pulls out of your game, and how far off your own is?

That does not need a platform you upload your game to. It needs one line of code and a place that collects the numbers. You keep your game, your address, your players. You get a backlink and, if we grow enough, attention.

Why this has to be a standard and not a product

I do not have to be the aggregator. Whoever does it most cleverly should win. I genuinely do not care.

What matters to me is that a standard exists through which this data becomes visible at all. When a game reports a score, it has to be clear what that looks like: which game, which player, which number, which mode, which version. Then anybody can build an aggregator, and the best one wins.

Getting in has to be laughably easy. Not "sign up and read our documentation", but: paste this one address into your coding agent. The rest happens by itself. It claims an id, proves the game is yours, and starts sending scores. Your page exists from the first value onward, with its own board, with as many boards as your game has modes.

Whoever reads the spec is not a human any more anyway. So it is written for agents: hiscore.txt, one page, no arguments, no signup.

The version belongs with it

One detail that is not a detail: every score has to carry the version of the game it was set in.

A record from version 0.39 is not the same record as one from 0.40. If you change a balance value in between, every older score silently becomes a score from a different game. Without that field nobody notices, and the list lies without anyone having lied.

So as of today the field is part of the definition.

What I make money with: not this

To be clear: this costs me a few euros a month, and there is no plan to make money from it.

I would have no problem making billions here one day. But that is not the motivation and I do not want to pretend otherwise. I earn my money elsewhere. This is something I care about, because I want it myself and nobody built it.

If it turns into a business, good. If not, it runs anyway.

The library that does not exist

In the end this is a trove of data nobody is lifting. What do people actually enjoy playing? Which ecosystems are hot? What is the best game I can play right now, in a browser, with no signup? What is the best game a child can play?

These are not exotic questions. They are the most obvious questions a player has, and it is completely absurd that they go unanswered.

There is no proper Library of Alexandria for gaming. I do not want to build it alone, and I do not even want to own it. I would happily be one nice island in a nice ecosystem of many other people building many other good things.

But some kind of foundation has to exist. So I am starting.

If you have a game: hiscore.txt. Paste the address into your agent. You are in inside five minutes.

If you want to play: the arcade. The records are there, their age is there, and so is every game where first place is still free.