Prologue

I love Fallout 3. It might be the best game of all time. I definitely had over 1000 hours logged. I remember my Xbox had the red-ring-of-death when it tried to load all the saved checkpoints I had. So much of Fallout was a unique experience–one of those things was terminal hacking.

I don’t know why I didn’t think to remake this sooner, but since I am a gopher, I decided to do just thazt.

For those unaware of this mini-game from Fallout, it is a terminal game with two columns filled with a combination of words and dud characters like brackets and what-not. One of the actual words is the winning word. The objective is to guess which of the random words is the winning word. In my interpretation of the game, you get five lives. Guessing the right passwords would normally grant you access to the terminal, but again for my interpretation, the game ends.

I initially wrote this in a low-level curses librarycalled termbox and later migrated it to a slightly morwe aesthetic library called tcell. I was also trying to add multiplayer capability to this and actually wrote a decent amount of code for it, but had to abandon this addition as the network protocol was not working on my new computer.