Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t the most fashionable computer game out there in 1999. But if you took a look beneath the pixels—the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the janitors mopping in their wake)—deep down at the level of the code, you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris Sawyer, the game’s sole developer, wrote the whole thing in assembly.
Programming in Assembly Is Brutal, Beautiful, and Maybe Even a Path to Better AI
Whether your chip is running a vintage computer game or the latest DeepSeek model, it’ll reward you for speaking its native language.
ILLUSTRATION: SAMUEL TOMSON