Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

24th May 2026

Tool Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games — Play a retro text-based escape game inspired by 1980s Usborne computer books, where you control doorways in a shifting house to align three exits before footsteps catch you. Use keyboard controls (X/C and N/M) or on-screen buttons to move the near and far doorways left and right, while the center doorway moves unpredictably. The game features authentic CRT phosphor aesthetics with scanlines and a pulsing HUD that tracks your remaining time and door alignment status.

Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Commodore 64 as a child.

These were so great! Beautifully illustrated books with fun projects made up of code you could type into your own machine.

I remember playing "Mad House" typed in from the 1983 book "Creepy Computer Games", so I fed that PDF into Claude and had it build an interactive version of that game in JavaScript and HTML:

Build a vanilla JS artifact that exactly recreates the game Mad House from this book, make sure it's mobile friendly and has a suitable retro aesthetic

Credit the book title and link to https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books

Screenshot of a retro green-on-black terminal-style game interface titled "MAD HOUSE — A REAL NIGHTMARE —" with a REC indicator, FOOTSTEPS 240, DOORS counter, three rows of ASCII corridors made of asterisks with ">" and "<" door markers, "PRESS START TO BEGIN" text, NEAR DOOR controls (X and C) and FAR DOOR controls (N and M), and a "▶ START / RESTART" button at the bottom.

Posted 24th May 2026 at 5:14 pm

Recent articles

This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 24th May 2026.

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe