The Apple II line of computers had an amazing run, from 1977 to 1993. In that time, hundreds of thousands of pieces of software were written for it, including many tens of thousands of games. Like any platform, however, the number of truly great games within that range is much smaller. If you ask any former (or current) Apple II user what the best five games on the platform are, there would be variation of course, but one game would be on everyone’s list: Choplifter.
The Blondihacks blog decided to reverse engineer this iconic piece of software:
Choplifter was written by Dan Gorlin in 1982, and published by Brøderbund. That date, 1982, is especially noteworthy. The game came out just a few years after the original Apple II did, and it remained one of the best games on the platform for sixteen years.
What really impressed me is that you can see how much effort he put into tuning the gameplay. The chopper feels really good when you fly for good reason. There is a lot of code doing a lot of little fudging of the physics and it’s clear it was all to make things feel better.
Why Reverse Engineer It?
The Apple II is still alive and well today, with a large and active retro-enthusiast community around it. Lots of new games are being written for it, and lots of programmers are still interested in it. If you’re a programmer new to the platform who wants to write games for it, however, resources are fewer. There are not a lot of full games with source code online for you to learn from. Looking at the structure and techniques in an existing successful game is one of the best ways to learn to write your own games. I myself have written a couple of Apple II things, but really wanted to see how the pros did it back in the day, so this is for my learning as much as anyone else.
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