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A free book explains Tempest by reading every line of the source code [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2026-04-24  

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 screen instead of regular pixels, which is why everything in Tempest looks like it's glowing from inside. The second game is Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000 from 1994, a remake for the Atari Jaguar that kept the tube and the shooting but wrapped it all in a psychedelic techno freakout.

The book reads both games line by line, showing the actual instructions the programmers typed to make them run. Each short chapter takes one piece of the code, like the routine that decides how enemies move or the trick that keeps the tube spinning smoothly, and walks through what it does and why. The PDF is designed to be read two pages at a time, with the programmer's original instructions on the left and the author's annotations facing on the right.

Jeff Minter is the British developer who has spent 40-odd years making games that look like someone fed a laser light show into a ZX Spectrum. Tempest 2000 is often called the best game on the Jaguar, which is a low bar, but Minter cleared it by a mile. He added bonus rounds, power-ups, and a thumping early-'90s techno soundtrack that matched the chaos on the screen. The book treats his version with the same obsessive attention as Theurer's original.

The same author has written two other teardowns of Jeff Minter games: IRIDIS ALPHA THEORY and psychedelia syndrome. The Tempest book comes in a 9MB standard version and a 27MB high-res version with sharper images. Pay what you want, including zero, at tempest.homemade.systems.

Previously:

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/04/24/a-free-book-explains-tempest-by-reading-every-line-of-the-source-code.html

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