The 8-Bit Gaming Theme is a Chrome browser theme that I created for the Chrome Web Store. The theme has a dark-colored tab bar with white and blue pixels. The background is flat and smooth, a blue color, with white clouds when opening a new tab.

I built the theme as an experiment, teaching myself Chrome’s manifest.json format.

By November 2023, the theme had more than 100 active users, far beyond the handful of testers I expected. I thought only a handful of people tested it out, so to have over a hundred installations was truly unexpected. Seeing classmates running it convinced me there’s an audience for fresh, nostalgia-tinged UI.