A long way from Melbourne, in my local library in North Queensland, I read Underground by Suelette Dreyfus, and it has captivated me ever since. It came out in 1997 and tells the true story of the hackers of the late 80s and early 90s. Mostly teenagers, a lot of them in Melbourne, sitting in their bedrooms with a Commodore 64 or an Apple II, a modem and the family phone line, getting into systems all over the world.
Julian Assange did the research for it, and he is in it too. He is Mendax, one of the hackers the book follows, years before WikiLeaks.
If you want more, the ABC documentary In the Realm of the Hackers from 2003 follows Electron and Phoenix, two members of the Melbourne hacking group The Realm. It is well worth the hour.
So I am making a game about it.
This is a pure passion project
I want to be upfront. I am fairly sure nobody will like this. It is a pixel art RPG for the iPad where you spend a lot of your time typing AT commands into a Commodore 64. There is no combat. There are no loot boxes. Your biggest enemy is your mum picking up the phone in the kitchen and dropping your call.
I am doing it anyway, because I love the book so much, and because I wanted to see what it would feel like to sit in that bedroom in 1987.
You play Cris, a teenager in Melbourne in October 1987. You have a C64, a 1200 baud modem your parents don't really understand, a Midnight Oil poster on the wall, and a note from your mate Gaz telling you how to get onto Pacific Island. Pacific Island was a real BBS, run by a sysop called Thunderbird1, and according to the book he would ring new users at home to check they weren't a cop. In the game he does too. So you have to answer the phone.
It is an open world, just not the kind you are used to. At night you never leave your bedroom, but the phone line goes everywhere, and what you find out there is up to you. No quest markers, no glowing arrows. Just phone numbers scribbled on notes, rumours on bulletin boards, and whatever you are brave enough to dial. During the day you can head out into Melbourne, and down the track that means computer markets, swap meets and second-hand shops, where you save up your pocket money and upgrade your gear. A faster modem, a second disk drive, maybe one day an Amiga 500 or a PC, if the year is right and you can afford it.
How I am building it
The thing I cared about most is that it is real. When you sit down at the C64 you are using an actual emulated Commodore 64, running inside the game. You type LOAD"CCGMS",8,1, you wait for the disk drive (it takes ages, go make a Milo), you type RUN, and you are in CCGMS, the terminal program people actually used back then. The modem is written from scratch and speaks the Hayes AT commands, with the dial tones and the screech. Get the baud rate wrong and the screen fills with garbage, just like it did.
Everything on the other end of the phone line is simulated: the bulletin boards, the people posting on them, and a VAX to poke around in. All the art is drawn in code, pixel by pixel. No AI image generation.
I am building it with Claude Code and a handful of agents. A historian researches Melbourne in 1987 and sources every claim. A writer does the BBS posts and dialogue. An emulation engineer looks after the C64, a playtester plays it and reports what broke, and a game designer keeps asking "but is this fun?". I play it, I complain, and things get fixed.
About one boot in fifty, CCGMS used to load to a black screen. It was a timing bug in the emulator between the disk drive and the C64's video chip, and it hasn't happened since.
I also got stuck in CCGMS after a call and asked how to quit. You can't. You switch the C64 off. So now Gaz has slipped a cheat sheet into your notebook.
Where it is at
The first chapter is playable on my iPad, from loading CCGMS on your first night to signing up on Pacific Island, getting that phone call, and finding your way onto the VAX. It is set a few months before Mendax turns up in the book, so you won't meet him yet. Later chapters head into The Realm, X.25 networks, and the years when it all came crashing down.
It is not an official adaptation of anything. It is a love letter to a book that made me want to know what it felt like to be there.
If you have read Underground too, or you were one of those kids on a C64 in a bedroom in Melbourne, I would really love to hear from you. And if you think this is a strange thing to spend my time on, you are probably right.
If you are really that nerdy and keen to play it, let me know and I'll add you as a TestFlight tester.