Early IBOL Brainstorming
IBOL (ICON BASED OBJECT-ORIENTED LANGUAGE) is the part of ChipWits I’m most proud of. Mike Johnston and I did a good job of creating a useful, fun language that is easy to learn and use. We cut the number of … Continued
THINGs in the 1984 ChipWitverse
One of the challenges of designing ChipWits was to come up with a simple but fun world for the bots to play in. When Mike Johnston and I started to shape our vision of the game we spent a lot … Continued
FORTH Programming Language (Going FORTH)
Why was the FORTH Programming Language used to create ChipWits? Long, long ago in an ancient era (1984) when microcomputers were a new thing, Mike Johnston and I fell in love with the Macintosh and bought one (for $4,700!) on … Continued
History of ChipWits Part 1: The Title
How the Heck Did Mike Johnston and I come up with ChipWits? Hi, Doug Sharp here. Mike Johnston and I designed ChipWits, coded it, and published it in 1984. I’m proud of the game and thrilled we’re rebooting it. I’ll … Continued
Robot Claw
Perhaps the most important way your ChipWit interacts with the world is to pick up items. This is done using the “PICKUP” operator, which extends a robot claw and picks up whichever item is directly in front of the robot. … Continued
Original Game Design
Before we start walking through our development progress on the reboot of ChipWits, we’d like to introduce (or review, for those who have already played) the game design of the original version of the game. Robots in Our Lives When … Continued
Unofficial Windows Version by Klaus Breuer
In 2006, Klaus Breuer, a German-Canadian programmer, author and traveler, released his own unofficial Windows version of ChipWits. This was a passion project of his after being inspired by reading this review in Creative Computing (more reviews here). Klaus saved … Continued
Reviews of Classic ChipWits
ChipWits by Doug Sharp and Mike Johnston In March 2008 ChipWits was named one of the Top 10 Apple II/Mac Games of all time by Maclife.com Thank you, WayBackMachine, for preserving these dead pages. “ChipWits is a program that every Mac user … Continued
Apple II Version
Screenshots courtesy of mobygames.com.