In the 1980s, young Mike Brixius started making an RPG on their Commodore 64. Having recovered and recreated a quantum of the work from old media, the ambitious project is being revived decades on. Progress can be followed (and subsidized) on their Patreon.
Ars Technica reports on an unusually deep to-do-list recovery.
So far, Brixius has, by hand-typing in his old code, gotten a facsimile of a simple overworld and dungeon working. He has already figured out one memory-saving fix, setting a single bit to define each wall space (wall, open door, closed door, secret door) rather than the two-bit system he originally devised. The game takes up 12K of RAM, split roughly evenly between code and data. Brixius figures his dungeons can be about 64×64 squares before he hits the C64's limits.
My one of these was a Graphic Adventure Creator game on the Amstrad CPC called Amazute. I just wanted to make cool art, though, and thanks to that quickly hit the typical 8-bit memory limits without getting far into the business of making interactive fiction.
