2026-05-24原文

Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Simon Willison recreates the 1983 game 'Mad House' from Usborne's 'Creepy Computer Games' using Claude AI. The interactive JavaScript version is now available online.

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Key points

Usborne has released free PDFs of its 1980s computer books.
Simon Willison used Claude AI to build a playable web version of the game 'Mad House'.
The game was originally published in the 1983 book 'Creepy Computer Games'.
The interactive version is mobile-friendly and features retro aesthetics.

Why it matters

This matters because usborne has released free PDFs of its 1980s computer books.

Technical impact

May affect model selection, inference cost, product capability, and evaluation benchmarks.

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Simon Willison’s Weblog

24th May 2026

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