Piepacker aims to be the ‘Game Boy of the cloud gaming space’

polygon.com:

I discovered the retro cloud gaming service Piepacker the way it was probably meant to be discovered: not through a press release in my inbox or a pitch from someone in public relations, but when a friend mentioned it in a WhatsApp group and invited me to play. I’d never heard of it, and the name sounded silly, but my friend said it had some cool old SNK games available to play. I watched the video on the website and it looked fun.

The pitch is very simple: classic games, playable instantly in your browser, with — and this is the important part — multiplayer enabled and integrated video chat. It’s cloud gaming and a virtual hangout rolled into one, it’s free to play, and inviting a friend is as easy as pinging them a link.

A few things struck me as instantly appealing about this concept. The immediacy, of course, is something that all cloud gaming services share. But the social element seemed important too, as did the way this resonated with the games on the service, which are largely local multiplayer games from arcades or from old home consoles: simple, direct games that are designed to be played with someone right next to you. Piepacker, with its prominent video chat and easy game-switching, puts the social experience before the games themselves. It creates an online space for relaxed, chatty, informal gaming sessions with friends — and, almost as a byproduct of this, it gets a lot closer to the original multiplayer experience of some of these old games than even online-enabled reissues can. It’s a couch in the cloud.

The lineup of games isn’t stellar, to be honest; you won’t find anything from the heydays of Capcom, Sega, Konami, or Midway here. There are a handful of true gems, like Metal Slug X, Windjammers, and