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As a kid I loved Chipwits (http://www.chipwits.com/), which has recently been modernized by the original authors. Also Robot Odyssey which can still be found online and run in an Apple II emulator (if you can get past the primitive graphics).

http://chipwits.com/

Program bots with graphic chips. A revival of a 1980's classic.

Yeah, I wrote it. But it's still my favorite game this year. So sue me.

The entry rule was that the game had to be playable and have at least one complete "level" but they weren't too strict on that. They also had you check off a webpage checkbox that made you promise that your game was created in the Indie Spirit.

I had fun last night playing Iron Duke: http://onetonghost.com/ , one of the web browser finalists, for its art and humor rather than its gameplay.

Self-toot warning: I entered my game ChipWits II http://chipwits.com/ . Didn't win but admire the winners and plan to enter another game next year.

Anyone want to port my game ChipWits - the original version - to the OLPC? I've asked on the OLPC Wiki but haven't followed up.

I wrote the first version in FORTH (in 1984 on the Mac, C-64, and Apple II), so the source code won't be much help.

http://chipwits.com/

Self-horntoot warning - I am also very proud of the game I did before King of Chicago - ChipWits - which I am reviving at http://chipwits.com/

Wow, that is old school. I remember when the family of a friend of mine in elementary school got a first-generation Mac and ChipWits was the one game they had for it. It seemed impossibly complex at the time, and every once in awhile I've wondered what it would be like now. I'm glad you're reviving it.

Off-topic, no karma bonus.

I'm still enormously proud of my Cinemaware game "King of Chicago". It was Cinemaware's 2nd best-seller in its first 2 years - waaaaay behind sales of Defender of the Crown by Kellyn Beeck (250k units DoC - amazing in '85, 50k KoC - nice in sales in '86). King was definitely not one of the 10 most influential Amiga games, however, because I rolled my own interactive narrative system - Dramaton ( GDC talk on Dramaton: http://www.zogax.com/verbiage/battle.htm ) - which was just a little too out there for anyone to replicate.

I did the first version of King on the Mac in '86 and then ported it to the Amiga and the Apple IIGS. I did my own art on the Mac (using digitized clay heads) but C-ware wisely redid the art for the Amiga, which had a lot to do with the big sales. Rob Landeros (who later formed Trilobyte and did 7th Guest) did the art.

Coding on the Amiga was a blast. The main online hangout for developers was BIX, the Byte Information Exchange. Simple things like screen-flipping for animation were poorly documented and there was little agreement in the first years about the best way to code them. You had to get down and dirty writing little fragments of code executed by "the copper" - the video coprocessor system.

"Cinemaware is still alive today and currently working on an update of Defender of the Crown.'" - And screwing the original game devs royally. They stripped any mention of Kellyn Beeck from their current version of Defender of the Crown and left my name off the King of Chicago credits on their website. Here's a little discussion with a current Cinemaware employee on the Indie Gamer's forum about their current version of Defender of the Crown http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=9738 &highlight=King/.

At least they'll never butcher King of Chicago because they'll never figure out Dramaton.

Self-horntoot warning - I am also very proud of the game I did before King of Chicago - ChipWits - which I am reviving at http://chipwits.com/ .

You could try GNU Robots, if you're willing to accept Scheme. It's still a work in progress, but the concept is you write a program (in Scheme) for a little robot, then set him loose to explore a maze. The maze is populated with prizes, food, and baddies (you can shoot them, or choose to avoid them.)

The nice thing about this is that kids can learn programming with an immediate payoff - they get to watch their robot in action on the screen. GNU Robots is the same concept as ChipWits, which has been "coming soon" for PC since 1999 (it originally was available on Apple and Mac).

Disclaimer: I am the originator of GNU Robots, but I left the project in 2000 after handing it over to another maintainer.

You may also be interested in GNU Robots. I wrote this several years ago, but stopped working on it in 2000 (it was complete, though.) The GNU Savannah site still lists me as project owner, but zeenix now does the development. He last checked in changes 2 weeks ago, so looks like it's still active.

I wrote GNU Robots because I had fond memories of the old Mac game, Chipwits. In Chipwits, you construct a "program" for a simple robot by setting down "tiles" or "chips" in a grid, where each "chip" contained a single action (check the space ahead of you, pick up an object, turn, move forward, etc.) There were T/F "chips" to make checks. Each "chip" was wired to the chips around it. This was a gentle introduction to the concepts of computer programming. I was already a programmer of sorts, but I found the game fascinating.

GNU Robots is a much simpler version of that, but (in theory) should be extensible to something like Chipwits. A robot program is written in Scheme, where you have functions available to make the robot turn, move, etc. You might be able to construct a programmer's GUI to set up a "tile" for each action, where each "tile" can be represented by Scheme code. And the wired connections to each "tile" can be represented by tail-recursion. I lacked the GUI programming knowledge to create this at the time, which is why I left it as a simple Scheme program. (If anyone out there is interested in doing this, many people will thank you for it.)

FYI: the Chipwits home page shows it as "coming soon" since 1999. So there's no hope in a return of the original.

I'm OT, but if you're going to compile a list like that, and leave off Chipwits, then either you missed out on one of the great Mac games of the 1980's or you need to turn in your Mac geek card.

Chipwits was great! You construct a program for a little robot by laying out "chips" with different instructions (move forward, turn left, pick up item, scan ahead, ...) and wire them together with T/F gates. Then, you set the little bot loose in a maze for him to explore. Blindingly simple to do, extremely difficult to do well.

Chipwits was a very addicting game. Mike Johnston (co-creator) was supposed to be releasing an update for Windows/MacOSX, but I haven't seen anything yet.

Closest you'll probably get to the original Chipwits is GNU Robots. (Disclaimer: I'm the original author of GNU Robots, but I handed that off years ago... looks like someone has picked it up again!)

Chipwits, for the original Mac, allowed you to program a robot by hooking together various bits of code that sort of resembled ICs. A google search turned up a Chipwits web site, but it doesn't appear to have anything to say at this point.

Another was "The Incredible Machine", where you solved problems by putting together various components to build Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions. It appears that some version of this game is still in existence, see this page from Sierra

Now I may have to actually try the new IM.