why hello katherine, my good friend. sorry it took me so long to answer your question.

the answer is my magnum opus: BIKE RACING. the year was 1996. gin blossoms' "follow you down" was sweeping the airwaves, dolly the sheep captured the world's hearts and imaginations, and i, a seven-year-old boy, was combining my two interests - riding my bike and fucking around in qbasic on the monochrome ibm pc/xt my dad handed down to me - into one.

the game was by all accounts (see: my spotty memory) Not Good. but it had options, you see, that reflected my incredible seven-year-old programming brain. you could enter your name (INPUT A$). you could choose between the two bikes i had at the time, the RED RIDER (its actual name) or the BLUE THUNDER (a name I bestowed). i made a bunch of fictional statistics like SPEED and TURNING but didn't know how to implement them, so the two bike options were entirely the same. i made a bunch of fake opponents that were named after my Real Life Child Friends but similarly didn't know how to implement them. like most attempts i made at that age to show off, it was all window dressing.

the one bit that did vary meaningfully was in your choice of TRACK. you see, in my backyard (the principal domain of Bike Racing) you had two options. you could rip around the backyard, starting from the concrete patio, past the giant spruce, around the maple, between the oak tree and the fence, whip around the rusting swingset complex my dad bought from sears, and back towards the patio. if I recall correctly, this was the BACKYARD RACEWAY. the other one, the PATIO SUPERSPEEDWAY, was literally "bike in a circle on the concrete."

the crux of the game was basically eighteen multiple choice questions as you "raced" around the track. so it would be like

and if you got the wrong "answer," you would instantly lose the race. to complete the race you would have to guess (and there was no rhyme or reason as to which "answer" was correct) eighteen straight correct answers. eighteen! i'm no mathmagician but the odds of finishing it successfully would have been astronomic. i recall there were lots of gotchas, of which some i was particularly proud of:

after designing that first track, I got lazy and wrote only four questions for the PATIO SUPERSPEEDWAY and copy-and-pasted them to make it seem longer than it actually was. tricks of the trade, you see.

i could say more about this game, but i'm already leaning too hard into, like, "wasn't I just the MOST CLEVER little BOY?" which, sorry. you didn't want that. what's more interesting for all of us, i think, is to dig into the "apartment game," which is a (somewhat derisive) term used to describe folks' initial forays into programming games, a category that BIKE RACING (though obviously not an apartment) certainly falls into. the idea is that when you're first learning to make games that model a particular space, you go with what you know, which is generally your immediate surroundings.

many games successfully riff on this concept - Shade by Andrew Plotkin is probably the best known example of this in interactive fiction; more recently, myhouse.wad does something similar in Doom. unlike these two, the majority of apartment games are seen as amateurish, or low-quality. this isn't unearned; first efforts usually are. but as i've gotten older, i'm trying to be more appreciative of first efforts; of the energy one puts into learning something new; of the expression and creativity required to take one's immediate surroundings and transmute them into something new and different and magical. it's a shame how often we discard those feelings because something isn't of a certain expected standard.

for example, i think a lot about this review of COMING HOME (1997) from ifdb:

Coming Home is an unremittingly awful game, one which never should have been released publicly. It's hard to think of it even as an exercise for the author to learn Inform, so buggy and illogical are its basic design and implementation. Perhaps it could be considered a first step toward learning the language; in my opinion, such bumbling, poor initial efforts have no place in a public forum, let alone a competition. It's not much fun wandering through somebody's ill-conceived, cobbled-together, inside-joke universe. In fact, playing Coming Home is a kind of Zen torture, an experiment in just how unpleasant interactive fiction can possibly be. Perhaps it's what IF is like in Hell.

this is so mean! like, just a shockingly cruel thing to write. there's a few things to unpack here. COMING HOME was entered into the 3rd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition in 1997 and finished 34th out of 34th. on ifdb.org it is included in a list of "absolute worst IF." perhaps that reviewer is correct: by the standards of the competition, it's not a good game. but the author was clearly young, was clearly learning how to make games in Inform (by their own admission in the hints.txt file that came with the game), and was excited to model their childhood house and siblings. playing through it now, there's moments of intense specificity in an otherwise unfinished game:

You are in the basement. This area is mainly used for storage and doing laundry. Many years ago it was a play area, but now everything is covered with black soot from a bad oil burner over 20 years ago.

or

You are in Ken's bedroom. Many years ago you slept here but now Ken has transformed it to a world of ashes, birds, and countless other odds and ends.

or in the character of Papa Sid (presumably the author's father:)

Once a friendly outgoing heavyset man, now old and confused. He does not say anything intelligable.

most significantly, there's a character named Allison who you have to pick up from the train station; she's described as "[y]our younger sister[,] a short woman with frizzy blond hair, freckles and broad shoulders." i didn't think this was of any particular importance until i read the hints.txt page:

Most people have beta testers to try out commands, but since I have no
friends, I am sure I have more of my share of inconsistent or silly
responses in this game. Hopefully, the contest judges will report some
problems to me. Maybe once this game is out on the internet I will be
contacted by future players.
A note to Allison - please correct my spelling and email me. Thanks.

i dunno, man. researching this just made me so sad. this game is the author speaking to himself in second-person, taking a memory and turning it into a traversable space, something to show off to his family. Allison was this author's sister and someone the author held in high esteem (one of the big "puzzles" in the game, after all, is picking her up from the train station) and it's hard not to read this entire game as a point of pride. i can't really imagine being in the position to read something so mean about something you create that is inherently so personal.

i didn't intend for this to be a dunking of the people who dunked on a game twenty-six years ago, but i can't help but wonder — if i still had access to BIKE RACING, which i don't, how would i feel about it now? after all, the bikes are gone. the computer i wrote the game on is gone. the spruce tree is gone. the maple is gone. the oak is gone. the swingset is gone. the dog that left the dog doo is gone. my mom is the only one of us left in that house now, and she's planning on selling; soon that house will be gone. all i have left of BIKE RACING is its memory, and the pride of "finishing" a game at a young age. it's disheartening to think that if i had taken it one step further — i.e., making it available online — i would probably have been too embarrassed and ashamed to think positively about something that, at one point, brought me a lot of pride and satisfaction.

(so, uh, to conclude a question that ended much differently than it started... be nice to people when they're trying things, because they're probably putting more of themselves into it than the finished product might reflect.)