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 which to create ChipWits. We immediately ran into a big problem—we didn’t have enough money […]
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 talk about the history of ChipWits in this series of Dev Log posts. Today I
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. Picking up good items such as pie, coffee, oil cans or disks can recharge your
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 the game debuted in 1984, the manual claimed that robots were just starting to become
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 the review for 15 years and finally decided to rewrite the game after finding a
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 should have.” Byte Product of the Month (1985) “If you have only one entertainment/educational program
