Category: Gaming

Fell into a nostalgia hole last week. Here’s what happened:

Sometime after a boring Steam Summer Sale, I asked ChatGPT if there was a way to play old Windows games on my Mac Mini M4 Pro. That one question kicked off a whole rabbit hole. You know how it goes. One minute you’re curious, the next you’re deep in forum threads and file formats you haven’t thought about in twenty years.

That’s kind of what I love about using ChatGPT. It never shrugs or says, “eh, maybe later.” It’s just always ready. Always down to figure stuff out. I’ve gone from random ideas to working setups in a single afternoon, just because it kept saying, “Yeah, we can do that.” This time, that yes led me back to Unreal Tournament.

I had ChatGPT generate me some old-school readme.txt instructions, like the kind you’d find on a sketchy FTP site back in the Unreal Tournament days.

File: UT-README.TXT

This was one of the first games I really played during the “video card” era of PC gaming. Software rendering was dead the moment OpenGL showed up. And with the right setup, Unreal Tournament felt like the future. We weren’t lugging CRTs to LAN parties anymore. We were online. It was 3D shooter warfare over cable modems.

I’ve since learned Quake 3 can run on Mac silicon too. Adding that to the to-do list.

I’ve been doing my daily walks, listening to the history of people creating shareware games (see previous post), and the way my brain works, I thought, “Hey, I want to make a game…” So I did. Honestly, today there’s almost no reason you can’t learn to create whatever you want.

Here’s where we are in life right now: I went to ChatGPT, told it what I wanted to build, and it was ready to roll. I didn’t just type “make me a helicopter game” (though you probably could). I started with an idea, mapped out a plan, and started creating the project with AI as my co-pilot. Along the way, I learned a ton about game design, building environments, creating graphics, setting up collision logic, debugging, and working on playability. Most importantly, I gained a whole new respect for the original teams behind games like Choplifter and Chopper Strike — they were doing amazing things with way less tech.

My goal was to create a working game demo, and after about 20 hours, it’s up and running. It’s my first real game under my belt, and now I’ve got a ton of ideas and the confidence to keep building whatever I want. It’s a fun place to be.

Could you do this too? Absolutely. Did my years of web development help? For sure.

Want to play it? eChopper 0.03 is here to play.

I’m going to continue to add a few game play features, and make it feel a little more complete, then I’m moving on to the next challenge.

Later, I’ll write more about how to actually learn while working alongside AI — not just getting answers, but breaking things down, asking why and how at every step.