My first game, and essentially the first original program I remember writing, was a single-player Tic-Tac-Toe game in QBasic, back in 1996. I'd uploaded some versions of this to AOL and people poked holes in my useless AI. Recently I found a few versions of it on an old floppy disk. I'm considering throwing it online for historical entertainment.

I have a vague recollection of making a somewhat Battleship-like game, where you entered coordinates trying to find the "villain" (which I'm certain I spelled wrong). After each move it would tell you how far you were. At the time I didn't know the Pythagorean Theorem, so I reported the sum of the X and Y distances. On capturing the villain, it would draw his evil face. I can't date this, vague as the memory is, and the code is lost.

In 1997 I did two more games in QBasic, collaborating with a friend on the ideas (though I only have myself to blame for the code). In one you had to navigate a triangle through a maze, various colors on the screen represented various kinds of portals or goals or barriers, and the triangle was always moving towards the right. This was called Rise of the Triangle because I also played Rise of the Triad with this friend. I also made a level editor for it, which let you draw the colored rectangles that made up the game, and set cheat codes.

The other game to come out of this was Cheese Reactor, wherein one controlled a ship shooting through a wall of moving blocks, trying to destroy the titular reactor as a countdown progressed. I have copies of a few different versions that I pulled off some diskettes, these may yet see the light of day.

Somewhere in approximately this same time period I put together a maze web site, called The Pyramid. I don't recall much detail, but I did a fair amount of planning on paper and I can picture a few Paintbrush illustrations I'd made. I'm not sure if it ever even made it online. I recall putting it on a floppy once but I don't seem to have it anymore.

Starting in 1997, I worked with another friend on a series of projects relating to a fictional universe we called The Mushroom Wars. I made a few game-ish things in support of this over the years, like:

• a JavaScript Whack-a-Mole variant (Zap the Mushroom, basically a hack on Hit-the-Dot)
• an Authorware Star mock edutainment program (Pierre's "How to Cook a Mutant Mushroom"), complete with simulated detention and a printable diploma on completion
• a QBasic game that was ostensibly a one-player Pong with weird stuff like randomness and cheat codes (Mushrong)
• and another QBasic project that never got beyond a demo of a stick figure walking around controlled by a joystick

Some of these are online, to my enduring shame, though getting the Authorware Star one to run apparently requires genuine 16-bit Windows.

In 1999 I began to put together more demo-like things. The most game-like was a spaceflight simulator. It displayed a diagram of the ship and various shield and fuel levels. The ship would take damage in random places, power would be diverted to various shields to cover it, eventually everything would finally fail and I'd draw a bunch of concentric circles to indicate an explosion; this was called NAME.BAS for reasons unknown. This I have still and might post for said entertainment purposes.

There were a few other things that never made it past the idea stage. And that's about it up until I put together Escape from Pong, which was still pretty damned cheesy but at least approximated seriousness.