1.0 beta · free, in the spirit of the XP-era classic
Your desktop has had it coming.
Smash, shoot, burn and nuke a screenshot of your desktop with 15 gloriously over-the-top weapons, or let a family of pandas move in and eat it. When you're done, press R and it's good as new. Nothing real is ever touched: not your files, not your windows, not your pride.
Free & open source · Windows 10/11 · 3 MB download · no installer
All drawn by the game itself. Click any picture for a closer look at the damage.
Press a weapon's key or pick it from the menu, then click anywhere. Most come in a few kinds too: pick one from the tray under the menu, or press V.
Click to smash: a shattered crater, spider-web cracks and flying shards.
Hold to fire: bullet holes, sparks and spent brass everywhere.
Hold to burn. The desktop browns and blackens, and patches keep burning.
Drag to cut glowing lines. Hold still to bore a hole.
Click to throw: a fuse, then a blast. Grenades near a blast go off too.
Beetles that chew tunnels and breed. Every other weapon kills them.
A flash, thunder and a branching burn. It arcs to nearby bugs.
Twists the desktop into a spiral and swallows bugs and grenades.
A can, a marker or splatter, four sizes and 16 colours, or a rainbow. Hold still and it runs.
Pour it on: it eats pitted holes and runs down the screen.
Saw a ragged slot in a spray of sawdust. Saw right round something and the whole piece drops out.
Changed your mind? Scrub the damage off by hand, suds and all. Even a nuked patch comes back.
Corruption spreads for a few seconds, leaving a trail of error boxes. (Only a pretend one.)
Call one down for a huge crater. Hold for a meteor shower.
Click, then take cover. A mushroom cloud, a firestorm, and a dead patch of screen until you repair.
Not a weapon: residents. They eat the desktop, build bamboo towers and huts on it, and sneeze on it. Weapons only make them jump, and the cleaner gives them a bath. They're off at first: switch them on in the About box, then hold the button for hundreds.
Made a mess you're proud of? Press S to save a picture of it. Press R to put everything back.
A program that grabs your screen deserves a straight answer, so here is exactly what this one does to your computer, and what it doesn't.
At startup it takes one screenshot of your screens and puts it up full-screen. All the damage happens to that picture. Your real desktop, windows and files are never touched.
It lives in memory and is never sent anywhere. It's only saved if you press S (or the camera button), and then only to your own Pictures folder.
It never connects to the internet or any network. No accounts, no telemetry, no ads, no update checks. It works just the same with the cable pulled out.
One portable .exe. No installer, no administrator rights, and it doesn't
change any system settings or the registry.
%APPDATA%\Smashtop\settings.txt Pictures\Smashtop\ To remove it completely, delete the exe and those two folders.
Esc quits, instantly. If it ever seems stuck covering your screen, Alt+Tab gets it out of the way, and Ctrl+Shift+Esc opens Task Manager.
You may see this blue SmartScreen warning the first time you run it. Windows shows it for programs that haven't been downloaded by many people yet, and for programs that aren't signed with a paid code-signing certificate. Smashtop is new and isn't signed (yet), so the warning doesn't mean anything has been found wrong with it.
To run it anyway:
The mouse does the damage. The keyboard has shortcuts for everything else.
| Input | Does |
|---|---|
| Left mouse | Use the current weapon |
| 1–9 0 Q W E T Y U | Pick a weapon (U is the pandas, once they're switched on) |
| Mouse wheel, right click | Next weapon (over the slider, the wheel sets the volume) |
| - + | Volume down / up |
| M | Mute |
| R | Repair the desktop |
| S | Save a picture of the wreckage to Pictures\Smashtop |
| [ ] C V | Spray paint: smaller / bigger, next colour, next tip |
| A | About (in it, P switches the pandas on or off) |
| H Tab F1 | Show or hide the menu |
| Esc | Quit |
Version 1.0 beta 2 for 64-bit Windows 10 and 11. A 3 MB zip with the exe, a plain-text README,
checksums, the licences and the full source. Unzip it, double-click
smashtop.exe, pick a weapon, click. Esc quits.
Free & open source · Windows 10/11 · 3 MB download · no installer
Built by Cal Parr of PeachByteSolutions LLC.
Written in Rust. Every sound is synthesised and every picture drawn by the code itself, so the whole game is one small exe with nothing else to download.
Inspired by Desktop Destroyer by Miroslav Němeček (Gemtree Software), the freeware classic of the Windows XP days. Thanks for all the smashing. Smashtop isn't affiliated with the original or its author.
Free and open source under the MIT licence or the Apache License 2.0, whichever you prefer. It comes as is, without any warranty: see the licence files in the zip.