This in-browser game emulator lets remote friends be Player 2

As the world continues to grapple with a strange pandemic and its impact on social relations, the craftier ones among us have tried to offer solutions that might have a healing effect on our nerves and loneliness. Telemelt is one of those lovely ideas. Shared on Twitter by electrical engineer Andy Reitano, Telemelt is a web-based multi-emulator that effectively recreates the experience of gaming with your friends — even if they're far away. All you need to do is hop on Zoom, Skype, Twitch, or a video conferencing platform of your choice.

How Telemelt works — According to Reitano, Telemet is a free solution for anyone seeking to reconnect with their friends while practicing social distancing. It "is designed to recreate the experience of playing single-player games in a room full of friends; watching someone run through a level or entire game, passing off the controller when it gets too difficult, taking turns, and laughing, and chatting the entire time."

Like we said, lightweight — Instead of dragging speed down with heavy response times, Telemelt is all about zero network latency. So you can game without experiencing sluggish delays and lags. Reitano suggests that you keep the URL for the session amongst you and your friends. You don't need to install anything. There is no need for registration. Reitano adds that there is no tracking, paid ads, or social media features. Telemelt genuinely comes down to the bare fundamentals, which sounds like a blessing in our overstimulated digital landscape.

Perfect logo — One of my favorite things about Telemelt is the branding design around it. The logo for the website reminds me of black metal logo art, which can be amusingly difficult to decode. Letters cross into each other, the colors are dense, and the font is from another realm. Have a look at it. It's delightfully silly.

It looks like people already love it. "I got to play with this yesterday and it’s so great," designer Wiley Wiggins remarked, "@batslyadams got game emulators running over the web, no installations, just share a link and you can play a game and pass the controller between multiple participants."