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The Uncrackable Game | Ch 3 & Ch 4

      A article written by the BBC, discusses the history of the "uncrackable" logic in an old Atri game called Entombed. This game contains a table that an algorithm uses to generate a wall or an open spacein which a player may move through. John Aycock, a computer scientist at the at the University of Calgary, wished to study Entombed as it had never been studied in great depth due to its lack of commercial success. In his studies, he came across a table who's logic was unknown. Aycock attempted to reverse engineer the table and to deduce the underlying logic that was used to create the table, but this was to no avail. Even after speaking to one of the developers of the game, who stated that the table was produced by another developer while they were drunk, the logic of the table was still unknown and remains such to this day.
      One popular guess is that this table was just formed from trial and error until the table produced the desired output from the algorithm. From my experience with coding, this is a very likely possibility. Often times this is the best way to work with complicated algorithms that require a simple input. Generating values that result in a "close enough" result, these can then be fine tuned by trial and error to get the desired output.
       The article also touches on the topic of video games as a form of archaeology, as they give a view into the difficulties of the times and how software engineers worked around the limitations of the technology of the time. Studying source code of old video games can pose a significant challenge as the hardware that was used to store the code is aging and will eventually fail, resulting in the loss of that code forever. This is an issue that not many people think about today, as cloud backups have all but solved the issue of lost code due to hardware failure. However, at the time games like Entombed were made, cloud backups did not exist. With the passage of time, hard drives have failed and the game cartridges themselves are well on their way to becoming unusable. It is very important that these are preserved digitally as functioning copies of the original games are becoming increasingly difficult to find with the passage of time.
      If you wish to try and understand the logic of this algorithm, I have included a link below to a coding sandbox where one can experiment and play with the original algorithm taken from the game Entombed.

"A game is a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful attitude"


The Mysterious Origins of an Uncrackable Video Game
Code Sandbox
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