Here’s the story of a game I made in 1994, when I was 12 | Hacker News Reader

Here’s the story of a game I made in 1994, when I was 12

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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.

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.

This reminds me of when I was a kid and I was trying to make WordPad save documents in WRI format by adding a 'save' item in the right context menu for the WRI filetype.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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 ;)

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.

Use the Mac emulator online. Or just send it to the Archive.org folks and have them load and share it for you.

I used an noname USB floppy disk to read HD floppies. I believe they are quite standard stuff but I guess the 400K and 800K DD floppies are different story.

Both Linux and current Mac OS X can read HFS formatted floppies and CDs nice and dandy.

Of course using some version of Mac OS is better than using Linux as it handle's HFS resource forks without problems and you get the file associations based on forks. With Linux you need to figure out file types and then add some file type endings.

This is fine for cross platform stuff like images and text documents but Mac only stuff like Hypercard files is hard as then you probably need to add missing resource type data with ResEdit with old or emulated Mac.

There might be a way to to map file endings to resource types with Mac's File Exchange or so but it was so long ago I'm not sure if I remember the Control Panel's name used for this correctly.

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure these are the older Mac disks that aren't compatible with regular floppy drives

The disks will work in a standard drive if they are 1.4MB HD disks, but the 400/800KB DD disks only worked in Mac drives

I went through a brief period where I ran out of disks and reformatted all my disks with compressed filesystems to eke out another 300kb of usable disk. Later I went back and tried out a wide variety of compression tools, I preferred .ARJ but I couldn't tell you why today...

You might recall then, that in those days the compressor just "guessed" at how big the uncompressed drive space should be. You could set it to anything that had sufficiently few digits.

This allowed you to put in absurdly large numbers. I had a 9.5Mb floppy drive when I first realized the number was arbitrary, but expected to be reasonably accurate given "typical use" (which was code for "not encrypted and not already compressed").

Of course when you used higher than realistic numbers, you'd just eventually hit the last compressed cluster and then your system puked while the software tried to figure out why it can't write the next sector.

Ah, man - I also recently dug up the disks for the first non-trivial game I wrote, aged 11 or so - but they were all sadly damaged by decades of sitting in a damp barn. It started as a galaga style evade-the-enemy ships side-scroller, then turned into a lunar lander type affair, which then metamorphosed into a wizball style pickup/power up romp across an alien planet, where you had to get your astronauts to the base before you ran out of air. I vaguely recall it had something to do with “Only You Can Save Mankind”.

Deluxe Paint III, AMOS, three floppies, scored it myself, went mad with AMOS speech synthesis, and when I was finally done with my masterwork, watching my kid sister enthusiastically play it for hours on end was awesome.

Then my parents sold my Amiga at a yard sale, and the disks just gathered mould and rust from then on.

You know, I don’t know if I’ve put that much passion into anything since.

Thing is, those disks can probably be recovered.

Remove the disc 'biscuit' from the plastic shell or jacket and wash it in warm soapy water. Rinse it and dry it out.

If that doesn't get them clean, try isopropanol.

Then transplant the disc into a new shell or jacket.

Use a good drive (Teac counts), clean the heads first, and read the disc in one shot -- you may well only get one try. Ideally use a Discferret, Catweasel or similar flux-level reader.

This assumes they're not Wabash or some similarly junky brand. For those, you'll need a sacrifice to the data gods and a whole heap of luck... not to mention a box of foam swabs and isopropanol to clean the disk drive up afterwards...

If you see bits of magnetic material flaking off the disc, don't even waste your time trying it. It's toast and will just end up fouling the heads on the drive.

In theory hard-drive-style non-contact reading is possible, but I'm not aware of anyone who's actually done it.

Maintainer of the HyperCard stacks collection on the Internet Archive (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/ 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I had a spectrum, and found a comic shop that had old 80s computer magazines that taught assembler. I also found a z80 compiler via obscure pen pals via small ads in the games magazines. Edge of the seat stuff, but the feeling of accomplishment was astonishing when you actually did something. I think the bar is so high for bedroom coders these days and they're always getting weird drag n drop languages pushed at them, which just stifles creativity (imho).

I had that exact experience. I was playing Half-Life (1998) and I learned that you could download the source and modify it (I was not a programmer, just some little kid with a computer). I somehow figured out how to download a free/trial of Borland C++, setup my dev environment, and recompile the entirety of the source code after making a one-character change (changed the friendtype of grunts from one integer value to another) so that they would treat the player as "friendly" and focus on shooting aliens instead. It was a very painful process.

This was before Half-Life: Opposing Force was released.

And wrote a game, without internet.

I myself cannot see coding without asking Google/Stackoverflow for help XD

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

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.

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.

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.

Oh the memories. I didn't have a copy of the manual, so I would choose functions from the list and guess the parameters. Spent many a math class working on programs to check my answers on the tests. When the other students found out and complained to the teacher she replied "I took an algorithms programming class in college, it was hard. If you can write a program to check your work you are welcome to."

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.

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