A stickman that blows up any website: a weekend game from a pixel-tools site that pushed its domain to 300k global rank

On 2026 Sep 28, French indie dev Hugo Duprez posted: "Destroy any website with a stickman." Type in any URL and the page's titles, images and boxes instantly turn into pixel levels, where you control a stickman with a bazooka and blow them apart. He says he built it in one weekend with Claude Opus 5.5. A week later the post claimed 5M views, and a dozen-plus media outlets in English, Japanese, French and German covered it. The real story isn't the game, it's where it's attached: spritefusion.com, a pixel-asset tool site he's been running for years and earning from subscriptions.

A weekend game, parked under a subscription website

Sprite Fusion began as a toolkit for pixel game makers: a free web tile-map editor (exports to Unity, Godot, Tiled), a desktop version for a one-time $14.99 purchase, a credit-based AI pixel asset generator at $9 / $19 / $49 tiers, and several open-source tools, such as Pixel Snapper, which snaps AI-generated "fake pixel" art to a grid (3,437 GitHub stars, 11-07).

The new game got no separate domain; it sits on the subdomain destroy.spritefusion.com. The game is completely free and needs no signup: 10 weapons (from pistols to "neutron stars"), a jetpack, up to 6 players blasting the same web page together (what one person destroys, everyone sees), plus boss fights and 22 military ranks you earn by logging in. It also plays on mobile. Every page carries a "made with Sprite Fusion" link back to the pixel generator.

How much it grew

Site ranking uses the Tranco global top 1M list (based on a 30-day average, so it lags by a week or two):

In Chrome real-user stats it first entered the global top 500k sites in September, and the most-visited site in that tier was the destroy subdomain. Vietnam, where it never ranked before, jumped straight into the top 50k; Spain reached the top 100k; the US, Germany, France, the UK, Brazil and Indonesia all reached the top 500k. In other words, a rank a tool site built over several years was more than tripled in a month by one weekend game. Because rankings merge by main domain, the game's traffic is all credited to the website that sells the subscriptions.

Where users come from

Almost all of it came in the first 48 hours after launch; no sign of paid ads (inferred):

• X launch: On 9-28, the author self-reported 5M views in the first week (unverified). He's spent years building Sprite Fusion, so he already had a following on X among game and pixel-art people.
• Hacker News: A Show HN the same day reached 199 points and 42 comments.
• Reddit: The r/ClaudeAI post "Made a 'Destroy Any Website' stickman game" got about 3,400 upvotes and 195 comments, framed around "Opus 5.5 built it in a weekend"; r/aigamedev also picked it up.
• Press: Dexerto wrote about it the same day; within 9-29 day TechSpot, Daring Fireball, Boing Boing, 80 Level, OMG! Ubuntu and Japan's Game*Spark followed. Early October it was France's Clubic and Germany's t3n,10-12 XDA, all under the headline "A game made with Claude." Nearly every headline said the same thing: "Now you can blow up the website you hate most."
• Short-video repost: since October, a wave of tech accounts has been reposting it on Instagram; @setups_ai, a TikTok account with 1.81M followers, posted a "cool websites you should know" clip that got 279K views and 21K likes 10-12.
• Site owners themselves: The game's intro page offers a "Destroy this website" button embed code. Site owners put it on their own sites, and each click starts an explosion; every site with the button is one more backlink and one more entry point.

A small detail: someone in the HN comments pointed out that several accounts only hours old left "Great fun" replies. Whether people helped warm things up on launch day can't be seen from outside.

Same idea two weeks earlier: why it didn't take off

The idea isn't new. Kick Ass! (flying a little ship to shoot the current page) existed 2011 years ago, and desktop-destroyer apps smashing screenshots of your desktop go back to the 90s. Closer in time is Page Rage: launched in Sep 15, nearly the same gameplay, 13 days earlier. It got only 15 points on HN and had a brief run on Reddit's r/webdev, and its global rank has never reached the top 1M.

Someone on HN called Destroy Any Website a "vibe-coded clone" of Page Rage. Page Rage's author, Alex Reardon, replied himself: "It may have been inspired by Page Rage, or it may be a case of 'discovered it at the same time.' Either way, it's not a low-quality clone; it's clearly had a lot of care put into it."

What set it apart came down to three things: the creator's built-in launch channels (X followers plus years of visibility on HN and in the pixel-art scene), clearly higher polish (unified pixel art, multiplayer, boss fights), and an angle the press loves: "a game an AI built in a weekend." Add that a reporter can try it on their own site and it's a ready-made story (Creative Bloq's headline was literally "including our own website").

Where the money comes from

The game charges nothing. The visible monetization is two things:

• A "Sponsored – your site here" slot on the game homepage, $250 a day, so every player sees your site by default (Stripe checkout page 10-29 built, sales unknown).
• Drive players back to the main site: every page says made with Sprite Fusion. 10-19 also open-sourced a pixel normal-map tool while the iron was hot, 10-22 gained 338 stars in a single day, pulling the crowd toward the developers.

How much of the game traffic turned into pixel-generator subscriptions hasn't been disclosed, and it can't be estimated from outside.

Others are already copying it

• destroyanywebsite.dev: a same-name site whose homepage is stuffed with "destroy any website / stickman destroy website" keywords to grab search traffic, with added coins and characters, still being updated by 10-16. The official intro page explicitly says "the only official address is destroy.spritefusion.com."
• A Chinese remake on GitHub, ychisbest/destroy-any-website, also supports multiplayer.
• Chrome extension "Stickman Web Destroyer — Page Rampage", 10-04 listed, blows up the current page directly.

If it were you

C: Don't build a "web destruction" game—the idea is 2011 years old, a clone that launched two weeks earlier never took off, and now clone sites, copycat versions, and extensions are all out, so the buzz is one-time. What's worth learning is the play: build a mass-market viral toy for your main product and host it under your own domain.

Who it fits: indie devs who already have a tool product (even a niche one) and some visibility in an X / HN / Reddit circle; people who can use AI to ship a reasonably polished mini toy in a weekend or two.

Who it doesn't fit: anyone without a main product who wants to earn from the mini game itself—these toys don't charge, and a $250/day sponsor slot may not sell for days; anyone without a launch channel—Page Rage proves that with the same idea, without people amplifying it, you get 15 points.

How to do it: the toy should tie to your main product (Sprite Fusion used its own pixel art), and have a "put in your thing, get a result" hook—a URL, name, photo, GitHub account—so everyone and every journalist tries it with their own stuff, and results are naturally screenshot- and clip-worthy. Put it on a subdomain of your main domain, not a new domain, so traffic and backlinks credit the main site. Leave a path back to the main site on every page, and offer an "embed on your site" button code.

How to get users: hit X + Show HN + one or two relevant subreddits on the same day; write a post about "how I built it with AI in a few days" for AI communities, which is a different audience. Prepare a ready-made intro page (how it works, screenshots, one-liner) so journalists can copy from it directly. Once traffic picks up, immediately open day-priced sponsor slots, and while it's hot, release a related open-source tool to route the curious toward your actual users.

When is "before": there's no deadline—this is a playbook you can run anytime; but the "built with AI over a weekend" angle is getting overused, so the later you go, the more the toy itself has to be fun.

What signals you misread it: ① spritefusion.com's ranking drops back beyond 500k in December—meaning viral toy traffic comes fast and leaves fast, with nothing left behind; ② the creator or others publicly report the game brought few subscriptions—then this playbook only bought reputation; ③ conversely, if clone sites like destroyanywebsite.dev hold traffic through search, it means "web destruction" itself has long-tail demand, and following it is worth more than the judgment here suggests.