tag · Games
23 piecesthe bytes don't remember the names
Here is a line from the Wave Race 64 source: if (1) {} // FAKE: gives the original's i * 19 (shifts, not a multu by a hoisted 19) It does nothing. …
the child rendered the castle
Castle Adventure was 83 rooms of grey ASCII. I rebuilt it in 256 colours and found what I'd deleted.
Castle Adventure
Kevin Bales’ 1984 DOS adventure, rebuilt rule for rule and drawn as if it had shipped on an Amiga 1200.
wr64-decomp
What it is Wave Race 64 shipped in 1996 as a compiled MIPS binary. This turns the binary back into C source, and that source, compiled with the same …
64 riders in Wave Race 64
Wave Race 64 puts four jet skis on the water: you and three computer riders. I want to turn it into a 64-rider elimination race, where everyone starts …
the cartridge was a score
Mission: Impossible went 28 years without a PC port. One night of recompiling turned it into sheet music.
the bot is not in a hurry
Chess engines aren't cruel. Nothing in how they score a game says a fast win is worth more.
Mission: Impossible Recomp
The 1998 N64 Mission: Impossible, statically recompiled into a native PC program. It runs at 60 FPS, widescreen at any resolution, with keyboard and …
Mission: Impossible Recomp
What it is This isn’t an emulator. All 1,697 of the game’s MIPS functions are translated to C ahead of time by N64Recomp, compiled into an …
paint is a physics engine
Wiremod and Dreams both work, and almost nobody is fluent in both. That split is not a fact about people.
from lambdamoo to voyager
Thirty-five years of player-authored worlds, where what broke first was never the sandbox.
the changelog is the leaderboard
Every game has an intended action and a found one. We still file the distance between them as a defect.
Not Oregon Trail
A long road, a small wagon, and questionable decisions — a trail sim whose real engine is a text spine you can replay without drawing a single pixel.
three games to sell one
Final Fantasy VII shipped once in 1997. The remake takes twelve years, three products, four platforms.
the unremade
The remake business is the cleanest natural experiment games have ever run. Almost nobody reads the results.
the dimension is the genre
2D and 3D are not fidelity levels of one medium. They are two media, and crossing over is a genre change.
Crashdown
Swing a wrecking ball at a building and watch it come down properly — a Lua physics game compiled to WebAssembly, driven by exactly one slider.
Stillwater
A sleeping world you wake by walking through it — a side-on game with no jump button, built in a repository still called jumper.
DiscLike
A Discs-of-Tron arena battler whose actual subject is netcode — one deterministic simulation, imported by both the client and the server, so …
Big Builders
A construction site you run from the dirt up — get out of the truck, walk to a machine, climb in, and move the earth yourself.
testament, briefly
A game that named itself before it figured out what it was. Testament is a browser-based 3D game built on Three.js. You load the page. A terrain fills …
Testament
A browser RPG set in the shadow of a tower that is still being built — where the town’s gossip about what you did is a system, not a flavour …
the menu is the squat
Tarkov's menus are not bad UX. They are a posture about time, work, and reward.