Meet the developers still making games for your calculator
Ask any professor, and they’ll probably tell you graphing calculators offer a plethora of mathematical uses, like plotting graphs, inputting trigonometric functions — you know, typical academic stuff. But for many bored students, they have long offered a secondary feature: the ability to play games in class. There are few better ways of skiving off with games like Doom and Portal covertly than tapping away on a graphing calculator — the school-sanctioned gaming system — as a lecturer rambles on about equations.
The history of calculator game development, which only began in earnest in the 1990s, may be recent, but it’s an eventful one. That’s because the graphing calculator is a relatively niche platform that’s not oriented around games, even if the platform has an ardent community of developers — many of whom create calculator games precisely because of the devices’ limitations.
Computer Lab Week is our ode to the classic “school” games, like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers, that kept us from being productive. Sure, you should be doing homework, but Carmen Sandiego is on the loose!
“I mostly [got started making calculator games] because I was bored out of my mind in class and a graphing calculator was the only electronic device I was allowed to use,” says John Cesarz, a web developer who discovered the hobby through fiddling with a Texas Instruments calculator in eighth grade. “But I kept doing it because I liked the challenge involved with [the] strict hardware limitations the calculator provided.”
Most people may not have heard of Cesarz, though the games he has replicated on the calculator are familiar recent success stories: Wordle, Celeste, and that dinosaur game from Google Chrome. Yet large communities centered
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