MacFORTH Code for 1984 Robot-Coding Game 'ChipWits' from 1984 is Now Open Source

Back in the mid-1980s Mark Roth was in 5th grade when the game ChipWits 'helped kindle his interest in coding,' according to an online biography. ('By middle school, he wrote his first Commodore 64 assembler and by high school he authored a 3D Graphics library for DOS.')

And 40 years later, Slashdot reader markroth8 writes that the programming puzzle/logic game 'inspired many people to become professional coders':

ChipWits was first released for Mac in 1984, and was later ported to Commodore 64 and Apple II in 1985. To celebrate the game's 40th anniversary, the team behind the new Steam reboot of ChipWits (including its original co-creator Doug Sharp, also of fame for the game King of Chicago) is announcing the recovery and open source release of the original game's source code, written in the FORTH programming language, for both Mac and Commodore 64 platforms.

Recovering data from 40-year old 5.25' and 3.5' disks was a challenge in and of itself, and most of the data survived unscathed! It's interesting to read the 40-year-old code, and compare it to modern game development.

'Our goal for open sourcing the original version of ChipWits is to ensure its legacy lives on,' according to the announcement. (It adds that 'We also wanted to share an appreciation for what cross-platform software development for 8-bit microcomputers was like in 1984.')

Read more of this story at Slashdot.