Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their…

By AI Maestro May 24, 2026 1 min read
Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

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.

Tags: computer-history, games, tools

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