Underground Caverns (1993)
I took my first programming class in eighth grade, 1993. We used Pascal. I was a total newb. I didn’t know what an array was; I didn’t know what a pointer was; but by the end of ninth grade I was making some fairly cool stuff. Witness the Underground Caverns, my ninth grade programming project.
This game began my unerring streak of being completely unoriginal and making games that already existed in other media. I owned the board game Hero Quest, which was pretty epic, and I thought it would be a great platform to reproduce. Those familiar with the original board game may recognize the stairs and level layout in the second screenshot.
I had zero knowledge of graphics programming, so the whole thing was done with ASCII characters on the 80×25 terminal. Hilarious. I still have the source and executable; it’s even more hilarious.
To give 14-year-old-me credit, I actually had a working line-of-sight engine, so you couldn’t see past doors or around corners.