When Brough was young his family bought a Tandy computer with BASIC installed. He spent many hours making games to share with his family. While he tinkered with BASIC, Brough often encountered bugs. He’d make a small change in the code, and a game would break in an interesting way. But instead of immediately fixing the error, Brough became fascinated with the bugs themselves.
“The idea that a bug could produce strange and interesting effects,” he says, “is a mythology that I like.”
868-HACK
A very interesting game that uses a dungeon like game mechanism. The goal of the game is to get through all 8 levels of the “dungeon” and aim for a high score. Along the way the player can collect resources and defeat viruses/monsters to survive. I thought it was fun, but also difficult.
Corrypt
This is one of those puzzle games, where the player needs to move boxes/things around to get to get through the dungeon and move on to the next stage. I liked how it added more complicated things like items and other characters in the dungeon, making the game more interesting.
“The way [it] works, you’re not sure if it’s something wrong with the game, or if it’s something intentional,” Brough says. His smile fills my Skype window. “I’ve had people e-mail me saying ‘there’s a bug in your game,’ and then describing it exactly as it’s meant to work.”
Vesper.5
This game looks a lot like the last game, and seems like another dungeon puzzle like game. However, it actually works very differently. In this game, the player can only move one spot per day. And takes a total of 100 days in order to reach the end. Throughout the dungeon, you can observe different items (but will delay getting to the end), but I thought were interesting t0 look at.