There is this one amazing old game that’s really tough to emulate. I mean, you can try. All the parts are still available for it. The keyboards, various different flavours of basic, information printed on paper. We might sit just outside the temporal requirements though. It’s an activity who’s time has past.

This is one of those tricky ones. I really like to avoid any write-ups of games that are just nostalgia plays. Games that wouldn’t hold up for a player today. If I say that Asteroids is one of the best games, I mean that. Not best games for when they were made, but games that were, and still are, a very good time.

I might go into some history and point out why a certain game stood out for it’s time, or why it did something innovative and important to the artform, but really, I want each game on this list to stand on it’s own. They are best games for a reason.

Typing in a program from a book is an activity that is almost impossible to recreate. Not because a person couldn’t get a book with a program written in it and they couldn’t turn around and type that program into a computer, because they absolutely can. The problem is a temporal one. Time has moved on and typing in a program from a book is not a required part of playing with a computer. At least a certain kind of playing with a computer.

Let me get into what makes this experience important and why it was fun. Many, many old computers had simple programming languages built into their rom chips. Usually some form of Basic. When the computer started up you would need to type something into it to make it do anything. Computers would come with books filed with simple programs written in basic. You could type those in and run them. Somethings they would do useful things like save and load programs stored in memory to a tape or disk. Lots of times the programs in the books were games.

If you wanted to play a game, you could buy one that came on a cartridge, a tape, or a disk, or you could buy a book full of games and type them in to run and play. Most of the time the games in the books were not great, but because you just typed them in, you started to develop some understanding of how they worked. How the Basic code worked. Believe it or not, that’s fun. Learning patterns, anticipating patterns. That’s fun.

Maybe, you would only type the program in once and then save it to a tape so you never have to type it in again, but probably not. You just started to get good at typing them in. And then you started to get good at changing them. Maybe a speed variable is set to 4 and you change it to 8. Maybe a health value is set to 10 and you change it to 100, or 1. Maybe you write entirely new lines of Basic that make the program work a little differently when you play it. Maybe you spend more time doing that than playing it at all. Maybe that’s the part that’s fun now. Maybe having to type them in from a book was a core part of that process.

People today are not going to type programs in from books. But they might still look into the inner workings of a program and make some changes. They might have as much fun, or more, playing with the internal values of a game. They might hack it, mess with it, decompile and recompile it. They might walk though a Unity engine tutorial and iterate on it again and again until they make Hollow Knight. They might enjoy the process of making the game far more than playing it once it’s done.

Typing in a program from a book is one of the first things I ever did with a computer. I did it an awful lot. Doing that today might only really be something you do for nostalgia reasons, but the spirit of the activity lives on in every beginner game dev that wants to know how a thing is made so they take it apart to find out. It remains one of the Best Games.