Web browser games are nothing new. The Web is flooded with them. But a game based entirely in your URL bar? Now that's something unique. And in just a few hours of tinkering with HTML5, developer Corey Johnson managed to create just that, in the form of URL Hunter.

It all started when Johnson came across a blog post titled Abusing the HTML5 History API for fun (and chaos). "The first thought that ran through my mind was 'I need to turn this into a game!'"

As you'd probably imagine, URL Hunter is a relatively simple game. You play as an O that wants to eat each and every letter a. You can move left or right, and then use the space bar to eat your prey. It's much more challenging than it sounds, though, especially considering that you only have 30 seconds to rack up a high score. The game was originally going to be more complicated, but Johnson cut back the experience so that it could be completed in a very short amount of time.

"It was surprisingly easy to get the game working," he told Ars. "Once I determined I could get a decent frame rate in the URL bar and that the keyboard response time was good, everything else fell into place. At first I thought it would be a good exercise to play with the HTML5 history, but I found out it didn't give me any advantages over using existing techniques. I was using Chrome to test it, in other browsers using history.replaceState() would have been a better option.

"I didn't want to spend more than two hours on this because I thought it was such a ridiculous idea, so figuring out a complete gameplay experience was tough. I had lots of ideas at first, but cut most of them because of my self-imposed time constraints."

Johnson currently works at GitHub, where he focuses on mobile and iOS development, but in the past he also worked at Maxis, the studio behind games like The Sims and SimCity. But large-scale game development doesn't appear to be in the cards for Johnson going forward. "It's more fun for me to create small and simple games in my free time."

URL Hunter ended up being somewhat of an Internet sensation, making waves across various blogs and Twitter feeds, most likely due to the sheer novelty factor. Not only was it the first game you could play in a URL bar, but it also helped to show the sheer range of HTML5. But in spite of the game's relative success and popularity, Johnson doesn't necessarily see the URL bar as a legitimate home for games.

"I think the URL bar is a pretty absurd place for a game genre to sprout up," he told Ars, "but apparently a lot of people liked it. I think smaller-scale games using the canvas tag have a lot more potential and I'm probably going to do some more experiments using that."