Toronto student creates RPG video game in Excel | Hacker News Reader

Toronto student creates RPG video game in Excel

metronews.ca

34 pointswill_lam17 comments

Microsoft used to include easter eggs in their programs, but stopped in 2002 as part of the "trusted computer initiative". [1] Excel 97 had a hidden flight simulator, Word 97 had a hidden pinball game, Access 97 and 00 had a magic 8 ball simulator. Office 4.3/95/97 had a hidden Doom-like gamed called "The Hall of Tortured Souls". There is also a car driving game in Excel 2000.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_produ...

> Office 4.3/95/97 had a hidden Doom-like gamed called "The Hall of Tortured Souls".

Wouldn't that be Access?

MS Access is actually a very very useful piece of kit; it's a surprisingly good database considering its limitations, and it's infinitely better than keeping your data with your business logic in an excel spreadsheet.

... Why people hate on it I'll never know.

VBA doesn't handle files larger than 2gb, which is one of the reasons people don't recommend using Excel and Access for your business. There are some ways to deal with the 2gb limit[1], but it is better to use other software.

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189981

Revision control aside, MS Access is not that bad for what it does.

However... I've seen management people write a couple of VB functions, think they magically turned into "Developers" (with a Capital D), and start barking random orders to people doing totally unrelated things with totally unrelated tools.

The actual danger is psychological, much like when the new iPhone user on the block magically turns into a "Design Expert" (Caps!) and starts hunting innocent bystanders...

No. The "tortured souls" are the programmers that worked on Excel[1]. Look at this page [2] for videos of the game in action.

[1] http://everything2.com/title/The+Hall+of+Tortured+Souls

[2] http://www.eeggs.com/items/719.html

Back when I was first starting to work in IT around 2000 I was working in an IT call centre that was part of a big consultancy. It wasn't the most exciting work and our PCs were locked down pretty tight but myself and another employee who also enjoyed programming would make little games(nothing to this scale) in Excel to then trade to the other workers. Reimplemented most of the kde games at the time and a simple pacman clone. Was working on a battleship clone but the networking from excel vba was a pain at the time and I got transfered shortly after to a real programming role within the company.

It's fun seeing other people doing this(and taking is very much further).

This is so trivial that I wonder how this got any comment at all ;-)

The real challenge is to build arcade games such as Pacman or Space Invaders: http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/

One of the successful 7drl entrants this year was made in excel. If I remember correctly, one of the devs was an accountant: http://7drl.org/2013/03/16/7drl-completed-excelent-rogue/

Wow, that's devotion. It's a huge platform, and the understanding that "even I can make that" is super-easy. I'm scared that it's Excel: it's such a crappy program, and wish it had a better language than VB.

Unrelated: Metronews aims at a very low grade-level.

All I can say is that this guy is slightly insane for dealing with Excel VB, but kudos to this guy's perseverance! I know I wouldn't have even bothered if I knew I had to implement it in Excel :), it's almost as bad as writing obfuscated C!

It says in the article that the author is an accountant working on her MBA. The relationship that accountants and MBAs develop with Excel spreadsheets is now legendary.

The author of the game did an AMA on Reddit yesterday: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1c7lka/im_cary_walkin_...

The horror. And the bravery :)

Why not Powerpoint? Same access to VBA, but lets you use graphic assets. Powerpoint is basically equivalent to Flash, given VBA as the "ActionScript". I'm surprised there isn't more (satirically) done with it.

Easier to use cells as pixels.

This reminds me of http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131968/microsoft_excel...

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