An Orion easter egg · no client · 2026 · free, in the browser

There’s a game hidden in this page.Go and find it.

Star Drill is an arcade flight hidden in the belt of this site. Five sectors, a station at Rigel, about two and a half minutes a run. There is a world scoreboard. Good luck with the station.

Play it →franbencosme.com/easteregg

A formation of enemy ships coming in over the asteroid belt, with planets behind and the shield and spiral bars on screen — What it looks like: a formation coming in over the belt. There are twenty-six of them.

The body’s record

What existed already: The engine of this site: three.js, no build step, and the six worlds of the journey.
What I did: Game design, the flight, enemies, the station, the cartridge, the logo, the HUD, the soundtrack, the scoreboard and its server, and the phone controls.
What I did not do: No Nintendo code, art or sound. The flight is rebuilt from the open sf64 decompilation. And the final tracks are remixes: the melodies are mine, the arrangement is Suno’s.
With whom: On my own, with AI as the second pair of hands
For whom: Nobody. No client, no brief, no deadline.

What’s in there

Five sectors, named after the stars you fly past on this site: Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Meissa, Saiph, Rigel. Twenty-six formations. A station at the end with four turrets and two phases. Three lives. A medal if you finish.

A run takes about two and a half minutes. There are thirteen achievements and a world board with flags. It works on a phone: steering goes wherever your thumb lands.

The flight is rebuilt from the open sf64 decompilation. There is no Nintendo code, art or sound in it.

Why there is a game here at all

This site is a trip through space and you steer nothing. People got to the end and said they wanted to fly.

It also has no client. The other six projects here were commissions, with someone else’s brief and someone else’s deadline. This one had neither, so nothing in it was negotiated.

It lives in the belt because that is where the cartridge says it lives.

The first version was not a game

Day one had a ship, a belt of rocks and a boost bar. That was all of it. The heading said flight test, which was fair.

Flying felt good. There was still no reason to open it twice: nothing to hit, nothing to score, nothing to lose.

What fixed it was unglamorous. A level that ends. Fewer waves, so clearing one counts. Enemies you can tell apart from the rocks. A streak that breaks the moment you get hit. A medal at the end.

Flying well turned out to be the easy half.

The first version of the game: one ship among asteroids, a boost bar, and a heading that reads ORION, FLIGHT TEST, THE BELT — Day one. One bar, no score, no enemies.

The hardest part was a piece of plastic

The title screen had to be a Nintendo 64 cartridge. The fat grey one with the arch on top.

Twice it came back as a different console — chamfered corners, ribs down the front. It was being drawn from memory. It only worked once we opened a photograph of a real one: a single arch across the top, the label following it, two rails down the sides.

The emblem on the front is the four-pointed star out of my own logo, because there is no Nintendo mark anywhere in this.

Three tries for the cartridge. One afternoon for the code.

The Star Drill title screen: an N64-shaped cartridge standing on a table, labelled STAR DRILL, THE BELT, AN ORION EASTER EGG — Third try, and the first one drawn from a photograph.

The finisher, on the third go

A bar fills as you kill things. When it is full you spend it on one enormous drill. It clears everything ahead and takes a third of the station.

I knew how it should feel before I knew how it worked — it is the finisher out of Gurren Lagann. So the first version got built from a description, and it looked wrong. The second was closer. The third is timed the way an animator times a shot, cut by cut, with the drill growing in two beats instead of one.

Four and a half seconds, and three goes to get there.

The Giga Drill Breaker: an enormous green drill of spiral energy emerging from the tiny ship and reaching the boss station — The third version. Four and a half seconds.

Why a theremin

Six tracks play in the game and all six are mine: a melody written with Claude, turned into a MIDI, then remixed in Suno. One of them, Luliby, is the song this site plays. The game is scored by the page it hides in.

A theremin has the lead on all six. It is a strange instrument, and every film that ever wanted space or aliens reached for one. That is the whole reason it got the job.

Zelda, Contra and rock records were on while I wrote them. The remixes are here: suno.com/@franbencosme

The wheel

born — a flight test. One ship, a belt of rocks, a boost bar.
destroyed — by the fact that flying well is not a game.
became — five sectors, a station at Rigel, thirteen achievements, and a world board.
survived — the theremin. The odd choice usually does.

Nothing here was negotiated. There was nobody to negotiate with.

What can be measured from here

20,008the score at the top of the world board the day this page went up. It should be higher by nowsource · Scoreboard, on the title screen
13achievements, and a time bonus, so a slow perfect run cannot beat a fast onesource · Achievements, on the title screen
0lines of Nintendo code, art or soundsource · the sf64 decompilation, credited in the game
2:47the fastest gold run on the board. A normal one is about two and a half minutes, plus the stationsource · Scoreboard, on the title screen

The board is open and the scores are real. Go and put your initials on it →

The Star Drill world scoreboard: ten entries with initials, country flags, scores, times and gold medals — The world board. I don’t know any of these people.

κ Orionis · a body nobody commissioned · came here to check · seeing IUranometria Francifelly · plate II · κ Orionis
a body nobody commissioned · epoch 2026.0 · Bencosme fecit