Show HN: Ported the 1999 game Bugdom to the browser and added a bunch of mods (reallyeli.com)

23 points by reallyeli ↗ HN
I think the very first video game I ever played was Bugdom by Pangea Software, which came with the original iMac. There was also a shooter called Nanosaur, but my 7-year-old heart belonged to the more peaceable Bugdom, which featured a roly-poly named Rollie McFly needing to rescue ladybugs from evil fire ants and bees.

Upon seeing the port to modern systems (https://github.com/jorio/Bugdom), I figured it should be able to run entirely in-browser nowadays, and also that AI coding tools "should" be able to do this entire project for me. I ended up spending perhaps 20 hours on it with Claude Code, but we got there.

Once ported, I added a half-dozen mods that would have pleased my childhood self (like low-gravity mode and flying slugs & caterpillars mode), and a few that please my current self (like Dance Party mode).

EDIT: Here are some mod/level combinations I recommend

* https://reallyeli.com/bugdom/Bugdom.html?gravity=0.3&video=s...

* https://reallyeli.com/bugdom/Bugdom.html?level=3&visual=2&gr...

* https://reallyeli.com/bugdom/Bugdom.html?level=8&flying_slug...

4 comments

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Good work! I first played this game in my elementary school computer lab which was stocked first with apple IIe. They then transitioned to apple LC with 1 or two Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One models. On these machines they had this game and Nanosaur.
<3 Thanks!

How old were you when you played it?

We used to race to school in the morning to try to get to the iMac G3s with Bugdom. From memory my school had three of them!