About this Tunnel Rush

This is an independent reimplementation of Tunnel Rush, made by Deer Cat Games of London and released on Poki in 2019. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to them. No code, artwork, audio or level data from the original is used here, and none was examined.

How faithful is it, honestly?

Less than it looks, and the difference matters. Replicas of old Flash games can recover their numbers by decompiling an archived Flash file, so their constants are the originals'. Tunnel Rush has no such artefact — it is a live commercial title, still updated, and this project deliberately did not download, unpack or decompile any part of it.

So everything here was built from what is publicly documented: the developer's own site and press kit, the publisher's game page, and the community wiki. Of the numbers in the simulation, exactly one is documented anywhere — the 100 levels. The other 23 are mine: chosen to feel right, not recovered. Where a source says something, it is followed; where nothing does, that is said plainly rather than dressed up.

What the sources actually say — and what this does with it

Left and right only, and the second key set is a second player. Arrows for one, A/D for the other; both work on their own.
The input rolls the view; there is no avatar to steer. The craft here holds still and the tunnel turns around it.
Instant death on contact. One touch and the run is over. No lives, no shields, no checkpoints.
100 levels, not an endless run. Clearing level 100 finishes the game.
Levels alternate between the inside and the outside of the tunnel. Here the odd-numbered ones fly the outside; the camera pulls out through the wall to get there.
Difficulty changes speed and nothing else — "higher difficulty does not change the level layout". So the layout here is a function of distance alone: easy, medium and hard meet the identical tunnel, at 0.82×, 1.00× and 1.22× the speed. The multipliers are mine; the rule is not.
No power-ups and no upgrades. There are none.
Difficulty rises through shapes, not speed: new shapes unlock with the levels and the openings narrow from three facets to two at level 12.
The obstacle names are the community wiki's own vocabulary — doors, windows, half walls, bars, cubes, triangles in 2-, 3-, 4- and 6-sets, and spinning rings. The names are documented; every dimension of them is mine.
The wiki classifies whole levels by the colour of their obstacles, and lists red, green, violet, orange and magenta. Those five hues are the only obstacle colours here. Their exact shades, and the order they cycle in, are mine.

Where the sources contradict each other

Two central questions have no agreed answer, and both are decided here rather than resolved.

Does the run speed up? The publisher's own page says no — "no progressive speed increases" — and treats speed as a setting you pick. Nearly every other page about the game says yes. This build takes a middle road: a slow ramp of 9 units per level from 620 to a ceiling of 1500, so a level always lasts 4.5 seconds. That contradicts the publisher's summary, and it is a judgement call, not a finding.
What is the score? The publisher implies levels and difficulty stars; community sources and old footage show a distance in metres. Both are shown here, with the level treated as the real measure of progress. The metre is 10 world units, which is also mine. The whole run is 47942 m.

Things nobody documents — invented outright

The tunnel's cross-section is the clearest case: no credible source gives a shape or a segment count at all, so the 12-sided tube here, with its 30-degree facets, is simply a choice. So are every radius and thickness, the steering feel (a sustained roll of 265 degrees per second at 60 frames a second), the ring spacing, the section lengths, the shape weights and unlock levels, the spin rate of the rotating rings, and all of the sound — which is synthesised from oscillators here, never sampled.

Additions that are not in the original at all

Reproducible runs from a seed, deep links to a seed and a level, practising a single level or a single shape, the on-screen shape name, the frame-rate readout, reduced motion, and a high-contrast palette. And one whole class of work with no counterpart in a commercial game: a proof, run before every release, that no tunnel this generator can emit contains an opening the craft cannot reach in time.

Controls

← → or A D roll · P pause · Enter or Space start a run · R restart · Esc close a panel. On a touch screen, hold the left or right half of the field.

Options

Difficulty changes your speed and nothing about the tunnel — all three meet the identical layout.

Sound Reduced motion — no screen shake or flashes Show the frame rate High contrast — brighter obstacles against a darker tube

The three below are not in the original. They exist because this build is reproducible from a seed.

Seed: -

Start on level 1 to 100

Practise one shape

Crashed

All 100 levels cleared