Simon Willison's Weblog: games

Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

2026-05-24T17:14:11+00:00

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Commodore 64 as a child.

These were so great! Beautifully illustrated books with fun projects made up of code you could type into your own machine.

I remember playing "Mad House" typed in from the 1983 book "Creepy Computer Games", so I fed that PDF into Claude and had it build an interactive version of that game in JavaScript and HTML:

Build a vanilla JS artifact that exactly recreates the game Mad House from this book, make sure it's mobile friendly and has a suitable retro aesthetic

Credit the book title and link to https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books

Tags: computer-history, games, tools

The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude

2025-12-06T18:30:56+00:00

The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude

Chris Lewis decompiles N64 games. He wrote about this previously in Using Coding Agents to Decompile Nintendo 64 Games, describing his efforts to decompile Snowboard Kids 2 (released in 1999) using a "matching" process:

The matching decompilation process involves analysing the MIPS assembly, inferring its behaviour, and writing C that, when compiled with the same toolchain and settings, reproduces the exact code: same registers, delay slots, and instruction order. [...]

A good match is more than just C code that compiles to the right bytes. It should look like something an N64-era developer would plausibly have written: simple, idiomatic C control flow and sensible data structures.

Chris was getting some useful results from coding agents earlier on, but this new post describes how a switching to a new processing Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code has massively accelerated the project - as demonstrated started by this chart on the decomp.dev page for his project:

Here's the prompt he was using.

The big productivity boost was unlocked by switching to use Claude Code in non-interactive mode and having it tackle the less complicated functions (aka the lowest hanging fruit) first. Here's the relevant code from the driving Bash script:

simplest_func=$(python3 tools/score_functions.py asm/nonmatchings/ 2>&1)
# ...
output=$(claude -p "decompile the function $simplest_func" 2>&1 | tee -a tools/vacuum.log)

score_functions.py uses some heuristics to decide which of the remaining un-matched functions look to be the least complex.

Via Hacker News

Tags: games, ai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, claude-code

Stimulation Clicker

2025-01-06T23:31:12+00:00

Stimulation Clicker

Neal Agarwal just created the worst webpage. It's extraordinary. All of the audio was created specially for this project, so absolutely listen in to the true crime podcast and other delightfully weird little details.

Works best on a laptop - on mobile I ran into some bugs.

Via @neal.fun

Tags: art, game-design, games

The Digital Antiquarian: Sam and Max Hit the Road

2021-07-17T03:12:22+00:00

The Digital Antiquarian: Sam and Max Hit the Road

Delightful history and retrospective review of 1993’s Sam and Max Hit the Road. I didn’t know Sam and Max happened because the independent comic’s creator worked for LucasArts and the duo had embedded themselves in LucasArts culture through their use in the internal educational materials prepared for SCUMM University.

Tags: game-design, games, history

Game developer’s guide to graphical projections (with video game examples), Part 1: Introduction

2017-12-28T01:07:36+00:00

Game developer’s guide to graphical projections (with video game examples), Part 1: Introduction

Absolutely delightful series of illustrated essays by Matej ‘Retro’ Jan explaining how different graphical projections can be used for video game art. Each concept is illustrated by screenshots or gifs from a mixture of games spanning four decades. Reading this was a real treat.

Tags: art, game-design, games, pixelart

Return of the Obra Dinn: Dithering Process

2017-11-23T21:21:55+00:00

Return of the Obra Dinn: Dithering Process

Lucas Pope (creator of “Papers, Please”) has a new game under development: “Return of the Obra Dinn”, a first-person adventure mystery game set in 1807 that is spectacularly rendered in a 1-bit art style. He has a development diary on tigsource.com, and in this entry he describes the extreme lengths he has gone to in order to develop the best possible dithering implementation for rendering his 3D world in 1-bit colour. “It feels a little weird to put 100 hours into something that won’t be noticed by its absence.”

Via Lucas Pope

Tags: game-design, games

Dead End Thrills

2017-10-12T02:23:58+00:00

Dead End Thrills

Duncan Harris Is a photographer who works in the medium of video game screen captures.

Tags: games, photography

Calendars: When posting a facebook event page for an event that is repeated on two dates, should you use one page or two? (The events are games that are identical and should not have overlapping players)

2014-01-07T14:43:00+00:00

My answer to Calendars: When posting a facebook event page for an event that is repeated on two dates, should you use one page or two? (The events are games that are identical and should not have overlapping players) on Quora

I would use separate pages. The most valuable part of a Facebook event page is being able to see who is going to that event (and hence which of your friends will be there). If there are two events on two separate days you want to be able to maintain two separate lists of attendees.

Tags: calendars, events, facebook, games, startups, quora

What are some great board games to play for 3 or more people?

2013-11-23T11:56:00+00:00

My answer to What are some great board games to play for 3 or more people? on Quora

I suggest looking in to German-style board games. They tend to be quick to learn and extremely well balanced but with a great deal of strategic depth once you get in to them, and they also have running times in the order of 45 minutes to an hour and a half. They're ideal for games nights, especially if you might be playing with people who think they don't like board games.

Contrast this with Monopoly, which is horribly unbalanced (people who do well at the start tend to pull ahead and stay ahead) and can end up taking hours to complete.

Three of my favourites are:

The Settlers of Catan - probably the most famous game in this category. It's a delightful strategic trading game for 3-4 players (up to six players with an expansion pack) which never ceases to delight people I introduce to it.
Carcassonne - a tile-based game for 2-5 players (up to six with an expansion). Again, very quick for new players to pick up. It also has a flawless iPhone/iPad port which is a great way to try the game out before getting the physical board game.
Ticket to Ride - a railway themed German-style board game for 2-5 players. I like the European map edition.

There are plenty of other excellent German-style games, but the above are three of the most popular and instantly accessible.

Tags: games, quora, boardgames

What are good ideas and examples for event gamification?

2013-01-27T09:56:00+00:00

My answer to What are good ideas and examples for event gamification? on Quora

Straight up points and badges style gamification seems a little contrived to me, but there's definitely a lot to be said for activities that encourage delegates to meet new people.

Here are two of my favourites. The first is really simple, but effective. Have the event host or morning keynote speaker encourage everyone in the audience to introduce themselves to the person behind them (there's a chance they already know the person next to them). Give them 30 or so seconds to talk, and you've set a great precedent for the rest of the event and created a bunch of new random connections in the room.

Brooklyn Beta 2012 had a brilliant variant on this. Firstly, they asked every attendee to put the event organisers in touch with a parent or close relative. The organisers then contacted all if those people and got then to answer done questions, which they used to construct a short attendee bio which was then printed on the conference badges.

These badges then became fantastic talking points and ice breakers... "What did your parents say about you?"

On top of that, they had another small but clever social hack: during sessions, attendees were encouraged to wear their badges hanging down on their back, so the person sat behind them could read their bio and maybe start a conversation in the next break.

One last example I heard about from the Picnic conference: lunch was served in picnic baskets for four, but you could only retrieve your basket if you found three strangers to share it with. Simple and clever.

Tags: conferences, games, quora, gamification

Are there guides for playing Minecraft on Mac laptops?

2012-12-12T11:52:00+00:00

My answer to Are there guides for playing Minecraft on Mac laptops? on Quora

I play on a Mac laptop using the trackpad and ctrl+click for right clicking and that works absolutely fine. It's worth fiddling with the keyboard commands in the options screen (as with any game) but I've found it to be perfectly playable otherwise.

Tags: games, gaming, macos, quora, minecraft

What programming language is primarily used in the making of big budget console games?

2012-12-05T13:11:00+00:00

My answer to What programming language is primarily used in the making of big budget console games? on Quora

C++ still rules the roost here, but many games also integrate a dynamic scripting language of some kind for scripting level logic and so on. Lua is a popular option for this.

Tags: games, programming, quora

Tuning Canabalt

2010-10-13T08:32:00+00:00

Tuning Canabalt

Fascinating insight in to the game parameter tuning needed to make a game feel just right.

Tags: game-design, games, recovered, canabalt

The Pac-Man Dossier

2010-08-11T11:20:00+00:00

The Pac-Man Dossier

Exuberantly detailed. Everything from how collision detection works to the exact pathfinding and target selection algorithms used by the four different ghosts. There’s even a tutorial for playing the legendary 256th level, where an overflow bug corrupts one half of the screen.

Tags: game-design, games, recovered, pacman

Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon

2010-02-17T17:30:54+00:00

Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon

The legendary “everyone’s a villager” game from Foo Camp ’08 gets a write-up in Wired.

Tags: foocamp, games, werewolf, wired

Just One More Grim Thing

2008-11-06T19:51:57+00:00

Just One More Grim Thing

Tim Schafer releases 72 pages of design documentation for Grim Fandango, my all-time favourite computer game.

Update 18th Feb 2025: That blog entry is no longer available, but Gameshelf preserved a copy of the PDF.

Via Waxy

Tags: game-design, games, grim-fandango, tim-schafer

GiantBomb.com

2008-07-22T07:09:28+00:00

GiantBomb.com

Launched today, powered by Django—a combination of (mostly ex-Gamespot) quality editorial content and a massive structured wiki of every computer game ever released. This is going to be a lot of fun—all of the crazy detailed content that Wikipedia tends to reject.

Tags: django, games, giantbomb, wiki, wikipedia

Walk, Don't Run

2008-05-25T14:04:30+00:00

Walk, Don't Run

A retrospective look at Grim Fandango (possibly my favourite game of all time) and the fan community that are keeping it alive, nearly a decade after it was first released.

Via The Escapist

Tags: game-design, games, grim-fandango, theescapist

Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming

2008-05-01T00:26:41+00:00

Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming

Scarily detailed online book on games programming, including 2D and 3D graphics, AI, multiplayer network code, indoor and outdoor rendering, character animation and much more. UPDATE: Removed the original link, which appeared to be a pirated copy.

Tags: algorithms, game-design, games, programming

Musical hackery

2007-11-22T17:03:43+00:00

Musical hackery

Indescribably clever musical video game creation, where images from classic games spell out their own theme tunes. The smartest thing I’ve seen on YouTube, well, ever.

Tags: games, genius, hack, music, youtube

Weewar (Nat v.s. me)

2007-11-20T23:52:54+00:00

Weewar (Nat v.s. me)

Really impressive turn based strategy game, implemented entirely in the browser. Surprisingly addictive; you have been warned.

Tags: games, javascript, weewar

Team Fortress 2

2007-09-23T22:33:33+00:00

Team Fortress 2

I gave this a go today for old time’s sake. Nine years in development and all they could come up with was TFC without the grenades?

Tags: games, onlinegaming, teamfortress2, teamfortressclassic, tf2, tfc, valve