Glitch is a self-hosted retro game streaming platform. Your games live on your hardware, stream to any screen, and are never locked behind someone else's servers.
Glitch started the way most good ideas do — with frustration. We wanted to play the games we grew up with on the devices we actually use today. Our phones, our tablets, the TV in the living room. But every solution felt wrong: sketchy ROM sites, emulators that crashed, cloud services that could disappear overnight. We kept asking the same question: why can't we just stream our own games like we stream our own movies?
So we built one. What began as a weekend hack — a Raspberry Pi, a handful of ROMs, and a WebRTC prototype — turned into something real. We figured out how to stream retro games at 60fps with sub-50ms latency over a local network, and then over the internet. We added support for more platforms: NES, SNES, N64, PlayStation, Game Boy, Genesis, and beyond. We built native clients for every screen we could get our hands on.
Today, Glitch supports 14+ retro platforms and works with games you already own. It runs on your own hardware — a NAS, an old PC, a cloud VM — and streams to any device with a browser. There's no DRM, no vendor lock-in, and no one can take your library away. We're still a small, indie team, and we plan to keep it that way. Every feature we ship is something we'd want to use ourselves.
We use open-source emulator cores from the libretro ecosystem and keep our roadmap public. While Glitch is proprietary software, we believe in being transparent about how we build and where we're headed.
Your game library lives on your hardware. We don't collect gameplay data, we don't track what you play, and we never sell your information. Your games, your business.
Our feature roadmap is shaped by the people who use Glitch every day. From Discord polls to GitHub discussions, the community has a real voice in where this project goes.
No subscriptions required to play on your own network. No always-online checks. If our servers vanished tomorrow, your Glitch setup would keep running. That's the point.