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
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