Little known fact about me. I’m a closet geek.
Ok, so maybe that’s pretty well known, but many people don’t know I used to be nuts for calculator games. Back in 7-9th grade I was all about coding games for TI-Calculators. Friends would let me borrow their calculators and I’d either hook it up to mine and copy some games for them, or just code a couple games from memory right onto their calculator.
My favorite game was a “racing” game I called BLAzE. It was based on a game my dad wrote called GoGo, which was itself based on a program you’d commonly find in those 100 Basic Programs books.
I’m still proud of that game. It ad a lot of things that other games of the day lacked, like a split screen with high scores at the top.
Anyway, I was doing a little Googling today and learned that, since I first wrote it 10 years ago, BLAzE has been downloaded almost 30,000 times! If you do the math (which I did), that means that somebody is downloading BLAzE once every 3 hours since it was released.
And we’re only talking about internet downloads. Like I mentioned earlier, the far more common way to get games is by transferring them from one calc to another.
All in all, my calculator games have been downloaded about 60,000 times.
Update: I decided to set up a little archive online of all my calculator games.