Back in 1992 I was reading a USENET post about the winners of the 9th International Obfuscated C Code Contest, and was intrigued by an entry named “CABBAGE”, for “Cellular Automata Based, Beautifully Abysmal Game Environment”.

Written by James Bonfield, the program allowed you to play space invaders, knockout, sokoban and similar games on a unix terminal, with all of the game rules expressed as 3x3 cellular automata transitions.

Over the years I’ve made multiple attempts to write something like this myself, starting in 1999 on Sony’s Net Yaroze, and then a version in Ruby (the video for that is embedded in the main page for this project), Flash, Javascript and C. But this time I really truly promise to go through with the project.