Recreating a 1980s Retro Game with Claude: Simon Willison's "Mad House"
Original: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games
Simon Willison used Claude to recreate "Mad House," a 1983 BASIC game from a free Usborne computer book PDF, into a modern JS web game.
Simon Willison leveraged Claude to convert a 1983 BASIC game called "Mad House" from a free Usborne PDF into a modern web app. By prompting Claude to generate a mobile-friendly, retro-styled vanilla JavaScript Artifact, he successfully revived the classic Commodore 64-era game with a green-on-black terminal aesthetic, showcasing LLMs' utility in software preservation and rapid prototyping.
Well-known technology blogger Simon Willison recently shared an interesting AI application case. He learned from Hacker News that the renowned British children's book publisher Usborne had released free PDF versions of its 1980s books on computers and programming. In their day, these books were famous for their beautiful illustrations and for the code (usually in the BASIC language) that could be manually typed into early computers such as the Commodore 64, and they served as a childhood introduction to programming for many veteran programmers.
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