This past week has been a real roller coaster for the ChipWits team. And the ride continues! We started out with some Reddit posts covering our open source of the original FORTH source code for ChipWits for the 40th Anniversary of the original game.
Our Reddit posts were very popular, and eventually we were picked up by Hacker News, a social news website that focuses on entrepreneurship and computer science. Here’s our story at #2:
This, by itself, is any nerd’s fantasy, and it drove lots of traffic to our website. Thankfully, we had just recently upgraded our website, and we were able to handle the load.
Now, beyond our wildest expectations, we were also picked up by Slashdot, a website that features news, reviews, and community discussion about technology. As of this post, we are still on the front page, and again our stats are going through the roof!
This is drawing lots of attention to our open source efforts, which has resulted in some really impressive people joining our ChipWits Discord Server. Among others, that includes John Morris (a.k.a. Disk Blitz, and author of AppleSauce, a digital archivist toolkit for retrieving data from floppy disks, who offered to help try to recover more data!).
The community is now attempting to get the original 1984 FORTH source code to build on a modern Forth that targets a web browser, so that the game can be revived and extended. Already, several pull requests have been merged in our github project, which has received 133 stars! This version would co-exist with our ChipWits Steam Reboot, which is also getting a lot of attention!
Thank you to all of our fans for helping us achieve this major milestone. All in all, we’re estimating that easily more than 100,000, perhaps even 1,000,000 people have seen the name ChipWits for the first time this week. That’s so exciting!