What do Prince of Persia, Apollo 11, and Spacewar! have in common?

They were built by geniuses, powered by sheer grit, and written in programming languages that have mostly been buried with floppy disks and punch cards. They’re ancient, brittle, and borderline unreadable by modern standards—and yet, they’re masterclasses in creative problem-solving. The kind of code that teaches you how to think, not just how to import a library.

One of the reasons I enjoy building Komment is that I get to use it to read these projects without having to dust off old Assembly references – I don’t have to be fluent in Pascal, 6502 Assembly, or ye olde pre-ANSI C to learn from them.

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🕰 Why Old Code Still Has Something to Teach Us

We tend to think the past has nothing for us—especially in tech. Everything moves so fast. New frameworks, new languages, new “best practices” every 18 months.

But when you look at the code behind something like the original Prince of Persia, you see a developer solving incredibly hard problems with almost no resources. No GPU. No high-level abstractions. Just a few kilobytes and some really clever hacks.

Studying that codebase is like looking at a stunning cathedral. Then getting closer and seeing it's built with lego. Then getting closer and seeing that the lego bricks were hand carved.

The codebase has some clever things to learn from but it’s like trying to learn German by sitting down with a copy of Goethe printed in Fraktur. It’s possible. But it’s going to take a long time to figure out what's actually going on.

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The Problem with Legendary Codebases

Here’s the experience of trying to learn from one of these classic codebases:

• You download the repo. It’s full of files with extensions you’ve never seen.
• The comments are in all caps. Some are in French. Some lie.
• There’s no structure. No docs. Just a cryptic main loop and prayer.

You want to understand the sprite engine. Instead, you’re 400 lines deep in something called MOVE.S that appears to control both jumping and wall collisions and maybe the music system? It’s chaos. Beautiful, historical chaos.

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Enter Komment: The Code Archaeologist’s Toolkit

One of my favourite things to do with Komment is point it at one of these projects and have the system parse the codebase and turn it into something much easier to grok.

And it comes with diagrams

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🕹 Case Study: Following the Flow of Spacewar!

Take Spacewar!—one of the earliest digital games, built in 1962. It was designed on a PDP-1, a machine that predated basically everything except carbon.

I threw it into one of our pipelines and got out a breakdown of how it does what it does.

You’re no longer staring into the abyss. You’re walking through the code like a museum exhibit, with a helpful guide whispering in your ear.

Check out the Spacewar! wiki on Komment

It must be re-run season.

After recently rebuilding Torch in ASCII using Phoenix and Elixir, I was inspired to do it yet again but with the original ray-casting-on-canvas look.

This is a super-simple express server with websockets and in-memory state. The more complicated multi-player raycasting makes a return this time though (no list comprehension shortcuts when we're doing it this way, unfortunately.

I still think there's some fun to be had in this game and maybe in another 15 years or so, I'll rebuild it again.

Github Repo: https://github.com/thingsinjars/torch-js

In an old, old callback, I decided to revisit a game design from… almost 14 years ago?!

Torch

I was looking for an excuse to play with Elixir and Phoenix and decided the best thing to do would be grabbing an old idea and throwing some new tech at it.

And, to mix things up, why not restyle it to look like a very old idea?

Using ASCII for this meant that I could actually do a lot of the visibility and ray casting using simple list comprehension (i.e. intersect all other player's 'lighted' cells with the current player's 360 ray cast visibility)

Github Repo: https://github.com/thingsinjars/torch

I wrote an RPG Adventure Guide.

I've been having fun recently with Lasers & Feelings and initially just wanted to make a quick little hack based in a fun and colourful world. Ideas turned into notes turned into scenarios turned into enhancements...

Long story short, I ended up with a 30 page adventure guide, two conflict mechanics, a bunch of set pieces and inspiration and a load of colourful characters.

Monster Coffee Break combines RPG, fantasy and comedy horror tropes with the heady and intoxicating world of corporate bureaucracy.

MonsterCorp is a sprawling corporate office catering to all kinds of monsters, from goo blobs to banshees to vampire bats. Employees run everything from nightmarish supply chains to scream-powered HR seminars.

The office is absurdly bureaucratic. Monsters need forms, signatures, and permits for everything.

This is definitely not a full RPG system. It just grew out of my own notes while playing with Lasers & Feelings. It's meant to inspire your own game, provide some interesting ideas and generally be a bit daft.

Some things might not make sense, some might not work. That's fine, just roll with it.

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Aside: I then used the opportunity to create a simple little one-page website for it and throw in some fun CSS to do with scroll snapping.

Monster Coffee Break