YouTuber picks up where he left off with RPG he started making almost 40 years ago on a Commodore 64

I imagine plenty of us had an idea for a videogame when we were kids and maybe got as far as drawing some characters or maps in a notebook. Mike Brixius went a bit further. Beginning in 1984, he started coding an RPG on a Commodore 64 with the working title Digital Dungeon Master, inspired by a couple of his favorites. He wanted to combine the limited-line-of-sight dungeoneering of 1982’s Telengard with the party of adventurers and overworld map of Ultima 4, and to set it in the fantasy world created for his homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Now, decades later, he’s dug up the floppy disks as well as pages of both handwritten notes and printed listings with handwritten comments he abandoned some time around 1989. Some of the disks were corrupted, but others proved retrievable, and you can see footage from what he’s got working on YouTube. “I have bits and pieces of the project from various points in its creation,” Brixius says, “but they don’t all work together as you can see by the font corruption in all my tests up to this date.”