Adam Saltsman on Canabalt’s physics:
Like we talked about earlier, the screen is 480 pixels wide by 160 pixels tall. The fastest possible speed for the player is 800 pixels per second, which in game scale translates to something like 80 meters per second, or 286 kilometers per hour! That’s pretty fast. But with a 480 pixel wide view, with the player on the extreme left, the player still has more than half a second (480/800) to react to whatever the game throws at them. This is a pretty good window, the limits of human reflexes for unexpected events is somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.3 seconds I think? According to hardcore Street Fighter players anyways. So even at it’s most intense, Canabalt is, technically, playable by humans.
It’s always amazing to me just how much math goes into these things. If you haven’t played Canabalt, you should. It’s online as a Flash game, and also available on the App Store for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.