Boing Boing

Boing Boing

A free book explains Tempest by reading every line of the source code

Ellsworth Toohey
Apr 24, 2026
∙ Paid

TEMPEST vs TEMPEST is a free book about two of the strangest-looking arcade games ever made. The first is Dave Theurer’s Tempest from 1981, the Atari cabinet where you spun a metal knob to rotate around the rim of a glowing geometric tube, shooting spiders and flippers as they crawled up toward you. The game was drawn with bright neon lines on a black s…

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