“This is a sick use of Fable credits” — top Reddit commenter
“OH I LOVE THIS!” — Matt Muir, webcurios.co.uk
“Oh no, not this again” — my friends
ORIGINS (1995)
Back in 1995, while in high school, I was trying to teach myself QuickBasic for DOS. I had a 500 page brick of a manual in English, droning on and on about booleans and other mumbo-jumbo I had no idea what meant. But somehow, over the course of months, I managed to make a small game. It was a collaboration with my friend Jesper — he made the graphics (pixel by pixel), I made the code (bug by bug).
We named the protagonist Preben — a Danish name which, at the time, was the silliest one we could come up with. In order to prove himself worthy of the awesome name, he had to pass four tests. We only ever got around to building one: Preben is trapped in a cave, fighting off killer bees and green mutant elephants with wings, with only his trusted rifle to help him. Survive three minutes in the inferno and you get… well, then you’re done.
The game turned out crude, but surprisingly addictive and challenging. Over the next couple of years, my friends and I would battle it out and compete for the highscore. In 1997, we gave the game its own website (obviously!), which got waaaay out of hand as a hobby for me, publishing made-up news from the imaginary world of the competitive sport of Preben.
Then life moved on, and Preben was moved to the \archive folder of my PC. Then a backup CD, then USB-drive, then Dropbox, then Google Drive, and stayed out of sight 30 years.
RESURRECTION (2026)
Fast forward to July 2026. The US government had banned Anthropic from releasing their new frontier model, out of security concerns. This model was so powerful, it could find software vulnerabilities previously unknown to us. It might be able to come up with novel bio-weapons. It might even be able to get tickets to Taylor Swift’s wedding.
And then it was released. For one glorious week, Claude subscribers would get access to Fable, including me! Obviously, as a good netizen of the 90s, I took these new immense powers and applied them to the stupidest thing I could think of: Reverse engineer my old QuickBasic code, and make a faithful reproduction of Preben, for modern browsers.
So I dug out the old sourcecode and with the help of the AI, over a Sunday afternoon, I (well, it!) managed to:
- Parse the original source-code and get all the game logic spot on.
- Extract the original sprites pixel-perfect from 1995 BLOAD memory dumps
- Recover the original timing from the BIOS-tick game loop (something I remember being very proud of having made, since it made the game run at constant speed, no matter if you had a 286 or a Pentium CPU).
And basically recreate the whole game for modern browsers, extremely faithfully, with some additional bells, whistles and easter eggs (try exiting to DOS....). It even has the old archived website embedded.
Thirty years ago, this game took me many months to build, now it was re-created in an afternoon. Preben is back online.
Warning: The game is simple, fast-paced and (especially since 30 years have been added to my motorskills) stupidly difficult. Keyboard required — remember, this is 1995.
Copenhagen, summer 2026
Theis Søndergaard