It's Pink

A strange title, I know, and one that probably needs a little more introduction than most. It's Pink was the first game I ever wrote, as a bright-eyed, buck-toothed, orange-haired 12 year old. From that description, you can see how I ended up in IT :-)

Now, the game wasn't called It's Pink at the start, and it has evolved over the years, but the basic concept has stayed the same. When three items match and you press the button, you get a point. If you miss, you lose a point. If you press the button when they don't align, you lose a point. Simple :-)

In the modern version, the card background colour and the word colour both have to be pink, while the word itself says "pink". Back in 1983 this would have been very difficult with a maximum of 16 colours, so the original game was a shape and a colour. And while it was no Daredevil Denis, it was still a game I was proud of. It had structure, rules and gameplay, and it was fun. Well, fun was different when you only had four TV channels and loading a new game took 32 minutes by tape.

The game has stayed with me ever since, and it has been my go-to when learning new languages and frameworks. Over the years it has morphed into the It's Pink format.

More recently, in the last year or two, I have also been using It's Pink as a bit of a test for AI, seeing how far the latest model from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft or Anthropic could take the game with just a brief overview of the rules and gameplay.

I've had a variety of results. Most of them got part of the requirement right but couldn't build a fully fledged game from such basic information. That was until about March this year, when Anthropic launched the latest version of their Claude model and everything spun on its head.

I gave the same basic instructions - "Please write a game called It's Pink..." - and then it thought, ideated, combodgialated, and after a few moments gave me an HTML file. I promptly downloaded and opened it, and lo and behold, there was a version of my game, fully functional and working perfectly.

Now, it wrote it as a single-page HTML app, which is not what I would have done. But to be fair, I gave it no technical specifications or direction, and it works. It picked HTML, it designed the home screen, the layouts, everything, all from some very rudimentary instructions.

For those who are interested, the game can be found here: It's Pink.

On a side note, I write these blogs in my head well before typing them up and getting Claude to clean them up. The line "it was good, but no Daredevil Denis" tickled me, as it's an obscure throwback to my past that only people with a BBC Micro would get. Anyway, that got me thinking I should build a Daredevil Denis tribute game. Which I have. Which then led to me reaching out to the original developer of Daredevil Denis to get his blessing. Which he gave.

12-year-old me is so excited right now. I got an email reply from Simon Pick.

More on the games I've built, and the ones I'm still tinkering with, over on the Apps & Games page, or head back to the blog.