Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

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retro-gaming ai-assisted javascript interactive usborne claude

Summary

A developer used Claude to recreate the 'Mad House' game from a 1980s Usborne book as an interactive JavaScript artifact, complete with retro aesthetic and mobile-friendly design.

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Cached at: 05/24/26, 10:35 PM

# Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games Source: [https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/24/usborne-mad-house/](https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/24/usborne-mad-house/) Via[Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258194)I learned that UK publisher Usborne published[free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books](https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-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](https://claude.ai/share/7b4a5617-f586-4744-b082-1650cab607cb)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.](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/mad-house.jpg)

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