The Retro Christmas Arcade — Where Holiday Magic Meets Arcade Legends

Twenty-five teams took on the challenge of building retro Christmas arcade games in 72 hours using Turbo, a Rust-based game engine that compiles to WebAssembly for in-browser play. From stealth platformers to bullet-hell roguelikes, participants shipped playable browser games — complete with pixel art, chiptune audio, and Santa Claus in starring roles. The competition ran December 19–22, 2025, with a preparatory workshop on December 13 and round-the-clock Discord support from Turbo's core development team.

✯ Grand Prize Winners

• 1st Place — Santario (Team: Gifthunters). A 10-level Christmas platformer with a level-select UI featuring performance ranks, varied enemy types across stages, and a final boss fight against Krampus. Also won Best Arcade Authenticity and Best Christmas Theme Integration. Score: 4.15/5.0. "Santario is a very strong end-to-end experience: intuitive controls, clear progression across levels, a polished level-select UI, varied enemy types, and satisfying audio cues — the end-of-level 'hohoho' stands out." — Svyatoslav Babinets
• 2nd Place — Santa Stealth (Team: Batman). Top-down stealth game with vision-based enemy detection, alert propagation between guards, a dual weapon system, and a boss fight with an enrage phase at 50% HP. Won Best Technical Execution. 13-file modular architecture across 14 judges — the most heavily reviewed project. Score: 4.09/5.0. "This isn't 'Turbo as a canvas,' it's 'Turbo as the engine.' Strong, end-to-end implementation with clean integration across multiple modules." — Sathiya Veluswamy
• 3rd Place — Santa in Space (Team: Berlin). Space arcade shooter with progressive boss fights, diverse enemy types, and polished sound design. Won Best Gameplay & Fun Factor. Score: 4.01/5.0. "I enjoyed the game's design and gameplay. The developer successfully achieved an organic blend of Santa Claus with a space-themed narrative." — Roman Seleznev

✯ Excellence Tier

• Santa Delivery (Abhinav Shukla) — Gift delivery adventure with atmospheric music, Krampus antagonist, and snowfall mechanics. Won Best Innovation & Creativity (4.30). Score: 3.99/5.0
• Turbo Santa Gift Rush (sanjaysah) — Pixel-art platformer and shooter across multiple modes with parallax snow effects and consistent visual identity. Score: 3.99/5.0
• Snowy's Adventure (O. Kaya) — Bullet-hell roguelike with upgrade system between waves, diverse projectile types, and Christmas ornament enemies. Score: 3.84/5.0
• Santa Islands (TM-AzhanAarif) — Holiday mini-game collection with single-player and multiplayer support, praised for detailed source code comments demonstrating engineering maturity. Score: 3.76/5.0

✯ Standout Innovations

• Present Thief (Hanuman Force) — Stealth mechanics with a hive-mind radio alert system where guards communicate within proximity range, featuring an adaptive AI director adjusting guard behavior based on player performance.
• SantaBash (SantaBash) — Dual-phase gameplay: 60 seconds dodging enemies followed by 20 seconds of precision gift delivery, with global community milestones tracked via Turbo OS Cloud that unlocked cosmetic Santa skins.
• Last Child Knows (ZAVA) — Christmas horror hide-and-seek with stealth mechanics and a genuinely unique 2D world projection perspective.
• Santa's Endless Run (beTheNOOB) — Zero external image files. Every visual element — including a detailed Santa character with red suit, white trim, beard, and gold belt buckle — rendered procedurally through 1,136 lines of code using only rectangles, circles, and text primitives.

✯ Community Choice — $500

Santasaviour (Genesis) won the community vote with 30 verified votes — more than double the second-place finisher. A three-level action platformer with coyote time, jump buffering, variable jump height, and a boss fight against Evil Santa with health-phase difficulty scaling. Voting ran on Discord with account verification to ensure integrity.

✯ Evaluation Panel

Projects were scored across five weighted criteria: Gameplay & Fun Factor (30%), Arcade Authenticity (25%), Technical Execution (25%), Christmas Theme Integration (10%), and Innovation & Creativity (10%). Turbo's core developers — Josiah Savary, Alex Feigenbaum, and LaTanya Donaldson — carried doubled scoring weight.

• Arun Kumar Elengovan — Director of Security Engineering, Okta
• Grigorii Sotnikov — Lead of Generative AI, Snap Inc.
• Pallav Laskar — Principal Engineer, Zscaler
• Mikita Hrybaleu — CTO, Zendrop
• Ivan Akimov — Software Engineer, Distributed Systems
• Andrii Kolodiazhnyi — Principal Software Engineer, Harman International
• Aleksandr Meshkov — QA Expert and IT Leader, FirstLine Software
• Sathiya Veluswamy — Senior Engineer
• Svyatoslav Babinets — Software Engineer
• Roman Seleznev — Software Engineer
• Nikita Letov — Software Engineer
• Oleg Efimov — Software Engineer

Plus 20 additional judges from the global engineering and gaming community, producing over 150 individual project reviews.