How GAMES
was born

Pisa, 1999 · Turbo Pascal · version 0.99

GAMES was written in 1999 at the University of Pisa, Italy, by two friends with too much curiosity and just enough spare time: Mattia Lumini and Alessandro Arcangeli, known to everyone as ARCA.

The tools of the trade were the ones of that era: a PC with a text-mode display, the Turbo Pascal compiler, and the glorious SOUND(n) procedure driving the PC speaker one square wave at a time. Six little games came out of it — Numbers, Red Light, Sound, Check, Memory, Sequence — each one a duel of logic, reflexes, ears or memory.

Version 0.99

The version number was set to 0.99 because the plan was simple: test everything, fix everything, and proudly release 1.00. It never happened. Exams, life, and time did what they always do, and GAMES remained forever one step from the finish line.

The rebirth

Decades later this web version brings GAMES back exactly as it felt: green phosphor, ASCII blocks, square-wave beeps — plus the things we could only dream of back then: a world ranking, ten lives per run, and players from every country.

This page is a tribute to everyone who worked on GAMES, played it in a university room, or simply heard its beeps from down the hall. Version 1.00 is still coming. This time for real.