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.
# 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`
Claude Code Game Studios is an open-source framework that transforms a single Claude Code session into a structured game development studio with 49 specialized agents, 72 skills, and organizational hierarchy to enforce quality gates and design consistency.