Stimulation Clicker from Neal.fun
“Do you know about Neal.fun?” I asked.
“Yeah,” says Ari, my seventh grader. “We used to play this in the library last year and told the teacher it was an educational game.”
For those who haven’t fallen down the rabbit hole yet, Neal.fun is a website full of interactive experiments—part game, part thought exercise, part total weirdness. It’s an odd mix of Ari and me, of young and old. It was created by Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old Virginia Tech graduate who has built something that looks a lot like the internet I knew in the late ’90s.
It revives that excited and exploratory feeling of the early web—before people figured everything out. It was a place where people made things because they didn’t know what was possible and impossible. The kind of thing Ze Frank used to do back in the day. Neal’s projects invite that same curiosity. You can guess auction prices, scroll through the ocean depths, or attempt to create the world’s most ridiculous password. There’s no real goal beyond exploration, and somehow, that makes it even more compelling.
Neal clearly wanted to capture this feeling through pages like Internet Artifacts, where he collects bits of digital history—things like the first smiley, the original Yahoo site, and the infamous Numa Numa video. ” It’s a tribute to the things big and small that make the internet what it is today.
The Wonders of Street View takes that same curiosity and turns it toward Google’s cameras, pulling together odd, beautiful, and unintentionally surreal moments captured across the world. There’s The South Pole, a UFO Crash, and Platform 9 3/4. It’s also where I found my new favorite internet photo: a gravestone for Internet Explorer.
Gravestone for Internet Explorer
Most people discovered Neal.fun when his game Infinite Craft exploded in early 2024, becoming the third most searched game of the year. It’s a simple but endlessly deep game that lets players combine elements to create new ones—starting with earth, wind, fire, and water but quickly spiraling into fusions of memes, historical figures, and abstract concepts. Before long, players were crafting things like Ohio, existential dread, and Shrek Jesus, and entire online communities formed to document the strangest combinations. Like the rest of Neal’s work, it starts simple, but the internet turns it into something much bigger.
Neal is also great at making sense of money—not just the numbers, but the sheer, ridiculous scale of it. Spend Bill Gates’ Money turns billions into a shopping spree, letting you casually throw around fortunes on yachts and skyscrapers until you start to grasp just how much wealth that really is. The Auction Game flips the perspective, making you guess the selling prices of rare and absurd historical items, reminding you that value is often just a mix of hype, history, and whatever someone is willing to pay. Both are less about finance and more about feeling the weight of numbers in a way that sticks.
Then there are the mashups of internet ideas—Absurd Trolley Problems, Earth Reviews, and The Password Game—where Neal takes something familiar and pushes it to the edge of absurdity. A simple moral dilemma turns into an escalating series of impossible choices. A review site shifts focus from restaurants and hotels to the entire planet. A password form starts off reasonable and quickly becomes an exercise in chaos. These aren’t just jokes; they’re experiments in how far a concept can stretch before it breaks—and somehow, they always break in the most entertaining way possible.
His latest game, Stimulation Clicker, was featured last week in The Atlantic’s The Worst Page on the Internet as a brilliant, if slightly unsettling, commentary on how digital life has gone off the rails. It starts as a simple clicker game but quickly turns into a frantic simulation of the modern internet, complete with social media feeds, endless notifications, and the creeping sense that you’re being pulled in a dozen directions at once. It’s both a satire and a reflection of the world we live in, proving once again that Neal isn’t just making fun little web projects—he’s saying important things in a fun way.
There’s something especially fun about seeing this little resurgence of the early internet’s creativity—not just on my own, but with my son. The things that first pulled me into the web, the weird experiments and playful projects, are finding a new life in places like Neal.fun. And while Ari and I might experience them differently—me, with nostalgia for the internet I grew up with; him, as just another fun site to mess around on—it’s nice to have something we both get a kick out of. Maybe the internet hasn’t changed as much as I thought. Or maybe, every generation just finds its own way to waste time online in the most delightful way possible.
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