Bonus.com was a free browser games portal for kids that launched in February 1997 under the tagline 'the SuperSite for Kids' and went offline around 2011. It opened with more than 500 Java games and activities across five sections called CyberWays, and by 2007 it ran Flash games alongside comics, avatars, a points system and a personal page called the Fridge. The Internet Scout Report credits the site to Appaloosa Interactive, the American arm of the Budapest studio Novotrade International.

What was Battlefield 2: Rogue Battalions?

Battlefield 2: Rogue Battalions was the flagship Flash game on Bonus.com, a top-down tank game set in a desert. You picked one of four clans (Martian Militia, Peace Keepers, Dune Dragoons, Blue Tide), drove a painted tank across rippled sand, and fought the other clans over territory. It was the hero panel on the Bonus.com homepage in 2007.

Can you still play Battlefield 2: Rogue Battalions?

No. The original SWF has not surfaced in any public archive, so there is nothing for Ruffle or a Flash emulator to load. Iron Dunes: Rogue Battalions is a from-scratch rebuild in JavaScript that plays in a modern browser, reconstructed from two surviving screenshots.

What other games were on Bonus.com?

The 2007 homepage listed Battlefield, Arcanom, Word Well, Scorched and The Best Football Game in its 'Top 2 players games' box. The wider catalogue ran to hundreds of Java and Flash titles across arcade, puzzle, word and strategy categories.

Bonus.com, the SuperSite for Kids

Q: What happened to Bonus.com?

The site went offline around 2011. The domain now resolves elsewhere and has nothing to do with the original portal. When Adobe ended Flash support on 31 December 2020 and browsers removed the plugin, the Flash games themselves stopped running anywhere, including in the few archived copies that exist.

Everything above this line is a rebuild of the Bonus.com homepage as it looked in September 2007, laid out in HTML and CSS from the original stylesheet and the one full-page screenshot I've been able to find. The real site went offline around 2011. Its games stopped running when Flash ended in 2020.

I'm Ben. I played Bonus.com as a kid, mostly one game on it, and a few years ago I went looking for that game and found close to nothing. This page is the record I wanted to find: what the site was, what was on it, and where it all went. The hero panel up top links to a playable rebuild of the game I was looking for.

The screenshot everything came from

The Bonus.com homepage in 2007, showing the blue navigation bar, the Battlefield 2: Rogue Battalions hero panel, and boxes for Multiplex, Top 2 players games and Avatars — The Bonus.com homepage, 450x322. The box titles, the game list, the language selector and the footer links in my rebuild are all read off this image and off the site's own `style.do` stylesheet.

The stylesheet is the reason the rebuild lines up as closely as it does. Bonus.com used a fixed 747-pixel content column split into 182-pixel cells with 2-pixel gutters, a 550x348 slot for the featured Flash game, grid headers in #1672bd, advertisement headers in #5f5e5a, body text in #036, and box titles set in bold 12px Lucida Grande, uppercase. Those numbers are lifted straight out of the original CSS, which survives in the Wayback Machine even though the Flash it was wrapping doesn't.

The banner logo, 138x196, rainbow swoosh and all.

What Bonus.com actually was

Bonus.com launched in February 1997 under the tagline "the SuperSite for Kids", with somewhere north of 500 games and activities sorted into five sections it called CyberWays: Play, Color, Explore, Dissect and Imagine. It shipped with NetScooter, a cut-down browser that would only open addresses on bonus.com, which in 1997 was a genuinely novel pitch to parents.

The Internet Scout Report's review from that year credits the site to Appaloosa Interactive, the American arm of a Budapest studio that had been making games as Novotrade International since 1982. That's the answer to why a kids' games portal from the dial-up era shipped a Hungarian translation.

It ran Java applets first and moved to Flash as Flash took over the browser. This was a pre-Newgrounds portal, one of the places a kid with a family computer ended up alongside Neopets, Funbrain and Miniclip.

By 2007 the site had grown well past a list of games:

Games, single player and two player, with a leaderboard box on the homepage titled "Top 2 players games".
Comics you could read and create, including a horror series called The ParanOrmals.
The Fridge, a personal page where you saved high scores and sent and received messages.
Identity, which covered avatars you could dress and animate, plus a character creator for a mascot the site called a Bonster.
Multiplex, a video section, and a collector card game the skyscraper ad was pushing.
Bonus points and awards, earned by playing and spent inside the site.

The language selector at the bottom of the 2007 page offered English, Spanish and Hungarian.

The games it put on the front page

The homepage box lists five, in this order: Battlefield, Arcanom, Word Well, Scorched, and The Best Football Game. Word Well got its own advertisement column that week, pointing at beta.bonus.com. The full catalogue ran to hundreds of titles across arcade, puzzle, word and strategy, and almost none of it has been archived in a form that still runs.

What happened to it

February 1997Bonus.com launches as "the SuperSite for Kids", with 500-plus Java games and activities across five CyberWays, plus the NetScooter browser that fences kids inside the site.

2007The version rebuilt on this page. Flash throughout, accounts, clans, comics, avatars, three languages.

Around 2011The site goes offline. The domain later changes hands and has nothing to do with the original portal.

31 December 2020Adobe ends Flash support. Browsers remove the plugin, and every Flash game that hadn't had its SWF pulled out and preserved stops running everywhere at once.

Two things had to go wrong, and the second one is why so little came back. A site going offline still leaves the games playable if somebody saved the files first. Flash going away meant that even a saved file needed an emulator, and an emulator needs the SWF to exist somewhere. Across most of the Bonus.com catalogue, it doesn't.

Battlefield 2: Rogue Battalions

This was the flagship. It held the 550x348 hero slot on the homepage, the one panel every visitor landed on, and the pitch on it was "Register and join a clan". There were four clans: Martian Militia, Peace Keepers, Dune Dragoons and Blue Tide.

The game was top-down tank combat in a desert. You drove a hand-painted tank across rippled sand under a green wireframe instrument panel, with a brass radar dome in the corner of the screen, and you fought the other three clans over the same ground.

Battlefield 2: Rogue Battalions title screen, a painted tank in a dust storm above an ENTER button — The enter screen, 340x324.

Battlefield 2: Rogue Battalions gameplay, a top-down tank on rippled sand with a green wireframe heads-up display and radar dome — The only surviving gameplay capture, 289x277.

Those two JPEGs and the homepage screenshot are the entire visual record I've found. No SWF, no video, no reviews. Searching the game's name today returns results for the EA shooter it shares half a title with, which is most of the reason nobody has written this down.

The writing survived, though. Bonus.com's own game page for it is still in the Wayback Machine, and it carries the full backstory, the four clans with their descriptions, the resource loop and every keyboard shortcut. I've rebuilt that page too: the Battlefield 2 game page.

You can't play the original, so I rebuilt it

Iron Dunes: Rogue Battalions is a from-scratch rebuild in plain JavaScript on a canvas. It runs in a current browser with no plugin and no install. The art was reconstructed from the gameplay capture above: the rippled sand, the painted tanks with their long drop shadows, the green wireframe panels, the radar dome. None of the original code, art or audio is in it, because none of it exists to copy.

The four clan names carry over, since they're the part of the original worth keeping. The Battlefield half of the title didn't, because that's an active EA trademark in this exact category. Hence Iron Dunes.

Play Iron Dunes Source on GitHub

If you remember this site

I'd take anything. Screenshots, a saved SWF, a bookmark folder, a forum thread, the name of a game you can only half remember. Bonus.com shut down before the people archiving Flash games got organized, so what turns up now comes off old hard drives. You can reach me on X, or open an issue on the Iron Dunes repo.

Common questions

What happened to Bonus.com?

It went offline around 2011. The domain resolves elsewhere now and has no connection to the original portal. Its Flash games stopped running everywhere when Adobe ended Flash support at the end of 2020.

Can I still play the Bonus.com games?

A handful of Flash titles that circulated on other portals survive in the Internet Archive's Flash collection and run under Ruffle. Anything that was exclusive to Bonus.com, Battlefield 2: Rogue Battalions included, has no surviving SWF that I've located, so there's nothing to emulate.

Is this the real Bonus.com?

No. This is a recreation on my own site, built from screenshots and the original stylesheet, with no affiliation to Bonus.com or whoever holds the domain today. The login box up there is disabled and doesn't go anywhere.

What was a Bonster?

The site's character creator mascot. The banner at the top of the 2007 homepage reads "Wanna join up? Become a Bonster!", and making one was part of signing up for an account.