Star Warrior

★ Star Warrior ★

A game handwritten in BASIC circa 1989, reconstructed and playable in 2026

In 1989, a 12-year-old kid at a boarding school in George, South Africa had a problem. Every night there were mandatory study halls — hours of enforced homework time for accounting, history, biology, geography. He hated all of it.

What he loved was making games.

So he'd smuggle game programming books into the study hall, hide them behind his textbooks, and spend those homework hours designing games and writing code — by hand, in pen, in a school exercise book. There was no computer in front of him. Just lined paper and ideas.

The school still practised corporal punishment in those days. Getting caught meant a caning the next morning — about an hour of lingering pain. He quickly worked out that was a pretty good trade for two hours of uninterrupted coding time. When he discovered they had a policy of only one caning per day, he stopped doing homework for all his subjects entirely.

Star Warrior is one of the games that came out of those study halls. Written in MSX BASIC across five pages of a notebook labelled "Computer Notes — Volume 2", it's a complete space shooter with stage progression, enemy AI, a shield system, and explosion effects. All handwritten. Never typed in. Never played.

The notebook survived 35+ years — lost and rediscovered many times between 1989 and 2026, moving across South Africa, but never actually captured onto a computer. In April 2026, the pages were photographed and the game was finally reconstructed into a playable HTML5 version with the help of Claude AI. A couple of modern embellishments have been added, but the spirit remains.

How to Play

• Arrow keys / WASD — Move your ship
• Space — Fire
• S — Shield (temporary invulnerability)

Destroy all enemies to advance. Enemies get faster and more numerous as stages progress.

The Original Source Code

The game was written for MSX BASIC (SCREEN 2 mode) and features:

• 16+ stages with progressive difficulty
• 5 distinct enemy types with homing AI
• Shield toggle mechanic
• Score tracking and lives system
• Sprite graphics defined with DRAW commands

Scans of the original handwritten notebook pages are included in the project screenshots.

Credits

Original code: Clive Crous, ~1989, York High Hostel, George, South Africa Reconstruction: April 2026, with assistance from Claude (Anthropic)

Made by Dark Art Studios