I wrote games. Originally in BASIC, for the the common 8 bit machines (PET, TRS-80, Atari). But also (hand assembled) machine language. My early ML adventures

I wrote games. Originally in BASIC, for the the common 8 bit machines (PET, TRS-80, Atari). But also (hand assembled) machine language. My early ML adventures were terrible. My early Space Invaders clone was awful. For SI, I couldn’t figure out how to tell one alien from another. So I stuck a different character in the middle of each one. Just dreadful stuff. Moving on to college, I moved from a lowly 8 bit to a multi user mainframe. And from BASIC to FORTRAN. This certainly alters one’s perspective on what a computer means. Nevertheless my friend and I tried our several attempts to write a rogue clone. We wrote that at least 4 separate times, across different mainframes and time share systems. Arguably our most successful was in our second Pascal rewrite (our first stab in Pascal was also dreadful). But we kept running out of resources. Write to your passion. Because when you write to your passion, you focus on making it work. And when you find you can’t make it work, now you can focus on making it better. None of those projects over all those years were ever finished by any stretch of the definition. We were far to busy making stuff up and breaking things.