I found a handful of Java applets I wrote in high school. I lost a lot of my other games at some point, but these ones were still sitting on my website. Unfortunately, modern browsers do not run Java applets anymore, so having the files was not quite enough for my kids to see them.
I used AI to help convert the surviving projects to JavaScript and HTML canvas. I wanted to keep the original pictures, rules, and general silliness instead of remaking them into something completely different. PennyPitch still has its three platform levels and the penny-toss game at the end. Mole-opoly still asks chemistry questions. Even the little paint program made it.
The main translation was from AWT painting and mouse/key listeners to canvas drawing and browser events. The old games mixed animation with Thread.sleep calls; the new versions use requestAnimationFrame with fixed-step updates so the game rules do not depend on the monitor’s refresh rate. For Mole-opoly, only the compiled classes had survived, so recovering its rules was part of the project too.
There are eleven projects in the collection. They are still very much high-school projects, including a chess board that I apparently never got around to making playable. But now the kids can actually try them without finding an ancient Java plugin. Pretty fun to see these running again.
Pick a game and play. The original Java archive is still there too.