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Harry McCracken revived his 1981 TRS-80 BASIC text adventure game, Arctic Adventure, using Anthropic's Claude Code to transform 141 lines of BASIC into a 20,940-line JavaScript/CSS multimedia web game with vector graphics, animation, sound effects, save slots, and clickable interactions. The process took a few weeks of vibe-coding, with Claude generating nearly all the code while McCracken directed, debugged, and refined. The piece reflects on the creative and ethical dimensions of AI-assisted development, including questions of authorship, the limitations of LLM-generated vector art, and the surprising joy of collaborating with an AI coding partner on a decades-old personal project.

My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza