What is Dragon Court: Revived?

Dragon Court was originally a game released around 1997 as a Java Applet, but it became abandonware around 2017. It was created by Fred Haslam, who handled the primary coding and design, with code contributions from Elden Bishop, additional design help from Lawrence Wegner and Diane M. Jones, and artwork by Ted Galaday.

The challenge of revival

The game relies on a dedicated server to handle saving player progress, mailing items between players, building clans, and maintaining leaderboard rankings. Since the original site went down, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was used to salvage as much as possible to bring back Dragon Court.

Only the last known client version was found as a Java Applet. Unfortunately, Java Applets were phased out by modern browsers since 2013 and removed from support by 2015–2017.

How CheerpJ made it possible

Thanks to CheerpJ, the original Dragon Court binary became runnable as WebAssembly and JavaScript in modern browsers without additional setup or tinkering. The final step was restoring the server-side functionality — saving hero progress, trading, clans, and leaderboards — completing the revival of Dragon Court for a new generation of players.