The 30 year game

The 30 year game

Today I'm releasing my Game Boy game called Marbles² (or Marbles Squared). It's a port of a game that I originally wrote back in 2002, but is a game that started in my life in (or around) 1996.

The development this iteration of the game, the one in 2026, took me about a week and I haven't written a single line of code. Here's how things have changed.

TL;DR

I get it, this is a stupidly long blog post. There's no real value buried inside of it, it's pretty much entirely a story of how technology has progressed over 30 years (not really a spoiler) and my journey to evolve a game that I found in 1996.

The latest edition of this game was coded entirely by Claude Code with one strict rule: keep inside of the 32K boundary limit. There was a huge saving that Claude never suggested (1bpp font tiles instead of 2bpp) which bought me 3K - which was enough to add a full tutorial in the game along with additional small features.

I also tried to vibe code another game using the same process only to fail - the key take away for me was that my experience and knowledge was still the guiding light. With the other game, it failed because my knowledge was shallow, so the output was shallow. Sort of obvious on paper, but a useful exercise for me.

Oh, and if you scroll to the end, there's a link to the game download page.

1996

At some point during my days during Sixth Form (college to some, basically aged 16-18), a close friend had (some) machine (that neither of us can remember) and they let me play a game on it.

Remy & Julie from their Sixth form days in the 90s<br>I remember really enjoying the game. It was technically a very simple puzzle game: a bunch of balls that you would tap the matching colour groups of balls and they would collapse down into the corner. The goal being to clear the screen.

I never caught the name of the game but my dad had a Psion and remembered that in the instruction manual (long gone are those times) it mentioned you could write your own software.

I'd been making little Visual Basic programs for friends for a few years by then, so I decided that since I had access to the internet (of sorts) through bulletin boards I would try and build my version of game so I could play it all the time!

When I finally managed to download and printed out the documentation (I remember it just kept printing and printing and printing), the very first is what hit the hardest.

SDK. This was foreshadowing. I had no idea what an SDK was. Nor any of the other mass of acronyms. And software development being gate-kept by the usual nerds meant there wasn't going to be any help with the "basic stuff".

(In truth is might have been any kind of acronym, I just remember being bewildered).

Google doesn't exist yet so I tried thumbing through the documentation and spent probably weeks just going back and forth just looking for any clue that would help me get a footing so I'd have something to start with.

In the end, I got absolutely nowhere. I park the idea and put it down to lack of knowledge, and lack of experience. This was not for someone like me. This was for people who had the inside knowledge. Plus, at that age, I had plenty of other (better) distractions.

2002

In 1999 I started my work placement for a year as part of my Computer Information Systems Design sandwich course degree (a mouthful!). In the end, I'd never return to finish my degree and stayed on for a decade.

Certainly a lot less dreamy that the 90s<br>But back to '99 and the start of the new century. The company was a web agency with the boss and two students (myself being one). Along with client work, the agency also had it's own side projects, one of which was Eurocool - a website dedicated to software for the Palm Pilot (they even made BBC news).

So I eventually bought myself one and through Eurocool I started notice that some of the games and some of the utilities came with source code and the source code was not huge and by this point I had learnt a lot more programming.

By that time I had tinkered with some C, worked with Java. I was writing JavaScript (JScript and VBScript). I was writing Perl and I could start to understand the functions of the source code and I went about making my first utility for the Palm pilot for me.

I started with a couple of smaller bits of software for the Palm Pilot, before I realised I could (and should) make a game

As it turns out that I'm not a very good graphic designer, so when it came to drawing circles for the Palm Pilot it was…very, very bad. The best I could do was draw squares and colour them in. So this is where the name Marbles Squared comes from ("it's a feature, not a bug!").

It took me until the mid 2020 so realise that the original game from the 90s was actually SameGame that I had unwittingly cloned (though only the game play mechanic, the Wiki page details the scoring system which I was never aware of).

One of the key mechanics of my version of the game was...