ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Digger —

Truly, digger.org is the way it should be done.

Celebrating ten years of effort, this website is dedicated to a relatively obscure game called Digger that came out for IBM PCs in 1983. I was one of the owners of this game, and absolutely loved the thing. A riff off of the arcade game Dig-Dug, it had, at the time, an amazing combination of sound and graphics, and felt like I was playing a game worth shoving quarters into. I enjoyed my time with it but life happened and I have very rarely thought back to that program.

Andrew Jenner, though, went ahead and did right by Digger, many times over. The program, long since incompatible with modern machines (in 1998), was in danger of being completely obscured and difficult to ever enjoy again. He disassembled the program, rewrote what needed to be rewrote, and made it compatible to the present day. His website goes into the process in great detail.

In fact, he goes into everything in great detail: the graphics, the company that made it, the programmers and people, the many little facts that are relevant to Digger, whichever direction you wanted to go.

I thought this was what the world wide web was going to be; I thought it was going to be a place where you could find, with ease and excellent presentation, all you needed to know about a subject that had caught your fancy and bring you along to not only being educated on what you were looking for, but get an entire bushel of additional information you never expected you would find. This is not borne out to be the case, generally, but it’s certainly the case here. I wish more people took Andrew’s approach.

Check out a game that was fun playing the first time, and worth playing again and again.


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