Some of the most exciting moments in computing, both technical and creative, happened in gaming. Games push boundaries. LLMs? Thank gamers for the GPU arms race.

Type to Play

My first computer was a Commodore 64. And there were games. Some legendary, some bizarre. Not all of them came on 5” floppies. Books and magazines used to print entire BASIC programs as source listings. So you’d sit down and type it all out before you could play.

That’s how I got exposed to programming. I started to notice patterns in these lines, figured out what parts of the code did what, and began hacking things around a bit to add some flavor. I realized that I could skip REM lines entirely and the program would still work — saving me tons of time. Pure dopamine.

Camping as an Insult

Then came the Amiga, then Pentiums, AMDs. I tried to learn C, but the textbooks were all about bit-twiddling — without the instant visual feedback that made it previously so magical. So I just played — lots of wonderful PC games.

When Quake 1 came out, it slowly took all of my attention. Later, Counter-Strike didn’t hit me the same way, so I skipped it. Eventually, everyone stopped spending nights in QuakeWorld and Team Fortress and I stopped gaming.

My love for interactive, visual logic led me toward HTML, CSS, later AJAX. All my attention shifted to the web (and some drugs).

Don’t Play. Still Love.

The only games I’ve really played through after Quake 1 were probably Braid, Firewatch and Papers, Please. On mobile: Limbo/Inside, Gemini Rue, Into the Breach, Balatro. Name any beloved classic from the 2000s onward — I probably missed it. Portal? Nope.

I still love games, even though I don’t play. I value the imaginative, immersive worlds they could offer — like a good book. The kind that makes your brain do the rendering. But today’s big titles chase realism. Now real actors play roles. We’ve moved from books to movies. One isn’t better — just different. But books undeniably ask more of your imagination. They hint at worlds, rather than showing you their version of everything.

Back then, you didn’t have a choice — you might’ve wanted cinematic, but hardware couldn’t handle it. But now you have it: symbolic or realistic. And while the mainstream tends toward realism, the symbolic hasn’t vanished — both exist!

Before I Turn 50

So I've been keeping this idea to write a game through all these years. Probably as a futile attempt to relive those moments typing in listings on my C64. Maybe also as an antidote to modern frontend engineering. Every time I see React struggling to re-render a few text boxes without lag, I'm reminded that web tech definetely took a wrong — though probably inevitably — turn.

So when I learned that two people spent 3 years getting Caves of Qud into public beta, then 5 more for early access, and another 9 to finally reach v1 — I realized I might not have any more excuses.

I picked up Zig, even though I’d never done any low-level programming. And I wrote the first few lines of a game. Imagine Frontier: Elite II meets Flatspace meets Roguelike meets Fallout meets WarioWare meets Micro Machines meets Non-violence and Sailing.
Sounds like too much, right? It is. But that’s what I have in mind as inspiration. Now I'm curious what gets to the release. The plan is to find out before I turn 50, lol.

Discussion: BSKY