The people behind the barricade
About
ConcertDefense is a small, free, offline-friendly arcade game built for the browser. It is part of brynsites.com, a collection of independent sites and tools.
What this is
One player, one stage, five tours. Towers hold the floor while a mouse-aimed cannon covers the pit. It is the kind of game you open for five minutes and close an hour later.
No account, no install, no analytics, no adverts. The whole game is a static folder of HTML, CSS and JavaScript — about two hundred kilobytes before fonts.
The idea behind it
The seed for this game is a single mission in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (Rockstar Leeds, 2006), called “In the Air Tonight.”
In it, Victor Vance has already spent two earlier missions keeping Phil Collins alive — first meeting him at the airport as gunmen open fire, then clearing armed gang members out of the stadium before a soundcheck. The payoff mission is the concert itself. Vic arrives at Hyman Memorial Stadium, is made to hand his weapons in at the door, and then has to work the venue as security with his fists while the show carries on.
The tension that made it stick: a performance is happening, and the job is to keep it happening. Trouble arrives from inside a crowd that is otherwise having a great night, the person you are protecting keeps playing regardless, and every problem has to be handled without stopping the music.
ConcertDefense takes that one idea and runs with it. Instead of a scripted mission, the show is endless: the band stays on stage, the pit keeps pushing forward, and the whole game is the stretch between the first chord and the last. The name, the stage line, the barricade, the armed-with-nothing feeling and the "the show must not stop" pressure all come from there. Everything else — the towers, the tours, the bosses, the endless mode — is new.
Worth reading if you have never played it: the mission write-up on the GTA Wiki. Grand Theft Auto and Vice City Stories are trademarks of Take-Two Interactive. ConcertDefense is an independent fan project with no affiliation and no assets taken from that game.
How it is built
Plain JavaScript and a single canvas element. There is no framework and no build step, which is deliberate: it means the game runs from a local file, a CDN, or any static host without a pipeline.
- Fixed 60 Hz simulation loop with delta clamping, so physics does not depend on refresh rate.
- High-DPI canvas sizing capped at 2× to keep phones cool.
- Grid-partitioned collision lookups for projectiles.
- Procedural chiptune and sound effects generated with the Web Audio API after a user gesture.
- All art drawn as canvas paths or inline SVG, including the hero speakers and the poster.
What it stores
Everything stays in your browser's local storage under the crd:v1: prefix, plus a single crd:theme key for your colour choice. That covers scores, unlocks, settings, your daily streak, saved-run snapshots and the reaction counts on the home page. Clearing site data deletes all of it. Nothing is transmitted anywhere.
Accessibility
Every interactive element is reachable by keyboard and shows a visible focus ring. The playfield is focusable, Space fires the ultimate, and pause is one key away. Screen shake and particles can be disabled in settings, the layout respects reduced-motion preferences, and a light theme is available and follows your system by default. Score and wave changes are announced politely to assistive technology.
Contact
For bug reports, feedback, or anything media related, use the contact details on the main site:
Please use that route rather than guessing an address on this subdomain; the main site always has the current details.
Changelog
- 1.9 — Clear Career/Daily mode switching with a colour-coded mode strip and shell tinting.
- 1.8 — Career mode named and separated from the daily gig throughout.
- 1.7 — Difficulty softened: more stage life, slightly softer enemies.
- 1.6 — Daily gig promoted to the primary call to action.
- 1.5 — Content depth: 60 waves, wave archetypes, five bosses, three new enemies, endless mutators.
- 1.3 — Mobile-first rebuild, light and dark themes, attract mode, daily gigs, saved runs, reaction buttons, error boundary.
- 1.2 — Grunge poster visual system, SVG hero art, canvas set dressing, procedural graffiti.
- 1.1 — Renamed to ConcertDefense, custom domain, share posters, leaderboard.
- 1.0 — First playable: five tours, six rigs, seven enemies, chiptune sequencer.