
Here’s the story of a game I made in 1994, when I was 12 - danso
https://twitter.com/rickbrewpdn/status/1210023029087985664
======
yters
I remember getting into QBasic as a kid. I played Gorillas, and noticed a
variable called 'banana' in the source code, which seemed to correspond to the
fact the gorillas threw exploding bananas at each other. So I thought
replacing it with a variable named 'baby' would cause the gorillas to throw
exploding babies at each other. Unfortunately, it turned out game programming
is not so easy, and hence began my lifelong foray into coding.

~~~
SamPatt
I learned with GW-BASIC and made a text based adventure game. I wish it was
still floating around the internet today but alas I believe I wrote it before
we got online and it didn't survive.

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bjackman
Beautiful! Strangely enough, when I was about 14 I used to make music using
Reason 3. My friends and I would upload it to a shared MySpace. Two of them
went on to become professional musicians, and a couple of years ago when
browsing a forum for their fans I found someone had uploaded a .zip of songs
ripped off the old MySpace, including songs I had made and lost!

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davidy123
I grew up in the country around 1980, with a Vic 20, then C64. I read about
dial-up services and eventually the BBS concept, but they were totally out of
reach. Aside from the quite great manuals that came with the computer, I'd buy
computer magazines when possible. I wrote a lot of simple video games, it was
a great escape. I remember writing a Dig Dug style game in a jag while my
family was away.

By 1985 I'd moved to the big city and had access to dial-up. I wrote a
sardonic platform video game called "Can You Get to the Very Top of the Thing"
which I shared with friends. By then we had access to every video game as they
were released, they were becoming incredible productions. Fortunately my
attention switched to writing BBS software.

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glandium
It's quite amazing how the only physical copy of the game ended up copied on
archive.org.

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ralfd
Ok, I beat the game into submission with the Fighter. Wizard and Thief are
more difficult.

You have to flee every strong enemy and farm weak Goblins/Orcs. When you have
enough money buy the best armor. After that you should win every fight and buy
enough health potions to get over 20 hitpoints. Search for the white robed man
(looks like a snow man on the map) and fight him.

You can save with alt-s and drink potions with h on the map. s is the
statistics screen. Help screen is F1.

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SimCity3000
When I was around 10 years old I made Use Map Settings (UMS) maps for
Starcraft. Freeze tag, Aeon of Strife clones etc. I lost them all and don't
think I'll find them again.

I also made maps for Half-Life and Counter Strike. I had them uploaded to my
Geocities page but have since lost them. Never found my webpage (cool_kirby77)
in the various Geocities archives either.

Those creations only exist in my memory now (and maybe others who played them
at the time). Sometimes I wonder if what I created was really as spectacular
as I thought it was.

The only thing I have saved from my childhood is a single-player map I made
for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The only reason I have it is because I
searched years later, and apparently someone took many of the custom maps from
the community over the years and uploaded them to some German website. So I
could download the .bsp, but the original .map was lost so I couldn't make
changes if I wanted to.

I downloaded the map, installed MOHAA and recorded a playthrough so I'd never
have to worry about losing it again:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhPK__EgsC4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhPK__EgsC4)

I made that map because I hated how in MOHAA (and most other games like Quake,
Soldier of Fortune etc) you were 1 man vs a million. I wanted an FPS where you
actually had (useful) allies that helped you throughout the game. Not much
longer after I released the map, a number of employees left "2015" (the
company that made MOHAA) and started a new company, Infinity Ward. Their first
game, Call of Duty, was very similar to MOHAA, but you were actually
surrounded by friendly troops that fought with you!

So I like to think that my map was a pioneer that launched a multi-million
dollar franchise and cultural phenomenon ;)

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ascorbic
I love these. A couple of years earlier I was writing games in HyperCard, of a
similar quality. I found the disks recently, but have no idea how to play
them. I don't believe those old Mac floppies will even play in any standard
disk drive.

~~~
betamaxthetape
Maintainer of the HyperCard stacks collection on the Internet Archive
([https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks](https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks)),
here.

If you're able to make a disk image, you can use the uploader site at
[http://hypercardonline.tk/](http://hypercardonline.tk/) to upload stacks to
the archive. If you need help reading the disks in the first place, contact me
(hypercardonline@gmail.com) and I can see if I can help.

~~~
ascorbic
That's awesome, thanks. I'll have a look when I'm next at my mum's house.
They've probably got all kinds of rubbish on them, but should definitely have
some of my HyperCard creations

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th0ma5
I took a major hit to my ego when I tried to make a game and failed. Actually,
I didn't fail, I implemented exactly what I was thinking of doing, I just was
too young to realize I wasn't incapable I just hadn't thought up a plan...
Which I guess was incapable in a sense, but not in technical skill, but just
overall creativity and execution. It took me a long time to remember all of
that and go easy on my 7 year old self.

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zerr
Kudos aside, it must have been cool owning a computer in that year and at that
age!

~~~
cpach
It was! :) But things are mostly better now. One striking difference is that
in the PC world back then, getting a sane programming environment was quite
hard if you didn’t have someone to show you how to do it. Many compilers/IDEs
were commercial and too expensive for kids who just wanted to try out
programming. I had a PC but I had no idea that Perl, Python or Scheme/Common
Lisp even existed.

~~~
einr
_Many compilers /IDEs were commercial and too expensive for kids who just
wanted to try out programming_

This is true, but on the other hand, every installation of MS-DOS came with
some version of BASIC, so there was really no friction, just type QBASIC and
you're immediately in really quite a good IDE with excellent on-line help.

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tluyben2
At least there were BBS's and magazines back then for some lucky people,
especially in the US I guess. In the beginning of the 80s I had 1 book (it
came with the computer) and just the help of some friendly older hackers at a
'local' (fair bit away; my parents had to drive me) event. There were no
magazines in any local shops yet, books were expensive and mostly not geared
towards learning and they were in English (not my native language; although I
am sure I aced English on my final highschool exam because of reading mostly
English day in day out).

The first years I had to learn like this and from experimentation. After a
while I had 'viditel'[0], which allowed downloading short programs and games
which I could study. I remember spending weekends just changing the source
code until I understood what it did; this was especially painful with
poke/peek; trying to figure our what addresses did what was painful without
help as exploring would more often than not hang the computer.

The advantage was; when you knew things, you were sure they would not be
different next year (or 20 years later for that matter) on that computer. So
once you got the hang of things, you basically could do them 'forever' (the
IBM PC was there but it was garbage compared to some of the homecomputers and
as a kid I couldn't see that ever taking off :). Very different from now. It
was not really possible to 'update' the OS (although I still have my eprom
writer from that time and it still works, so I could definitely install new
hacked versions of basic, but that was a lot later).

When the BBSs became normal here, things started to go a lot quicker. I ran my
own one and worked with people to write our own BBS software in turbo pascal.

Really quite a shame all the source code of the games, demos and bbs software
got lost. I sold my second computer and foolishly sold all tapes + disks with
it, also from my first system (which I still have, but without my own
software). I didn't care as I was going to upgrade to an Amiga so I did not
want that old stuff anymore.

[0]
[https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viditel](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viditel)

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guytv
Wow. Amazing work. Bring backs lots of memories of early "Personal computer"
programming days. Kudos for actually finishing a game project at 12. Thanks
for reminding me of happy childhood programming computer memories.

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ikeboy
When I was 13-14 I made games on a TI-83 plus in TI-basic. Made poker,
blackjack, pong, some dice games. The biggest project was a version of space
trader, I think I just had two commodities and two worlds but it worked.

~~~
DamnInteresting
Some of my earliest coding experience was making games on my trusty TI-82 in
high school. I had home-made blackjack, slot machine, fly-spaceship-through-
randomized-asteroid-field, and a favorite among my fellow students, Russian
Roulette, complete with gruesome graphics. It was silly, but it was a great
way to get into coding.

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Pigo
I still Paint.NET a lot on my windows devices. That's funny to see the guy who
authored it with a Rick & Morty avatar.

