I Grew Up on Commodore 64. Forty Years Later, AI Helped Me Build the History Games I Always Wanted.
Every now and then, technology reaches back across time and taps you on the shoulder.
For me, that tap came while "vibe coding."
I am not a software engineer.
I am a philosophy graduate. A journalist. A community activist. A history teacher. A graphic designer. An old-school computer nerd whose first encounters with programming were on the Commodore 64, typing BASIC programs from magazines and wondering how lines of code could conjure worlds from nothing more than imagination and patience.
Life took me elsewhere.
Into newspapers.
Into classrooms.
Into community meetings.
Into activism.
Into philosophy.
Into trying to understand Jamaica—not just as a place, but as an unfolding story.
Yet somewhere in the back of my mind, that little programmer never really died.
Today, artificial intelligence has become something extraordinary. Not because it replaces human creativity, but because it lowers the walls between imagination and creation. It has allowed people like me—people with HTML, CSS, a little BASIC, an object-oriented way of thinking, and decades of accumulated experience—to begin building ideas that once would have remained trapped inside notebooks.
So I started making games.
Not because I wanted to become the next AAA game developer.
Because I wanted to teach history differently.
History Should Be Played
Too often, history in our schools becomes a procession of dates, governors, acts, examinations and memorisation.
Students are asked to remember history without ever living it.
But history is conflict.
It is uncertainty.
It is difficult choices.
It is ordinary people trying to survive extraordinary circumstances.
Games understand this instinctively.
When you make a decision inside a game, you become emotionally invested in its outcome.
That is why I began experimenting with interactive historical simulations.
One prototype explores Jamaica's colonial past in the spirit of The Oregon Trail, where survival depends not only on resources but on understanding the social, political and environmental realities of the period.
Another prototype experiments with a free-village RPG, imagining what life might have looked like after Emancipation as formerly enslaved Jamaicans attempted to build communities, economies and identities from almost nothing.
They are rough.
They are unfinished.
Sometimes they break.
Sometimes the code behaves like a stubborn mule.
But they are alive.
And every version teaches me something new.
Vibe Coding Meets Old-School Thinking
People talk about AI as if it performs magic.
It doesn't.
It amplifies curiosity.
The AI doesn't know what it wants to build.
I do.
Years spent writing HTML.
Designing graphics.
Thinking philosophically.
Teaching students.
Writing newspaper columns.
Understanding Jamaican communities.
All of those experiences become architecture.
The AI simply helps me assemble the bricks faster.
It feels strangely familiar.
Back in the Commodore 64 days, we experimented, failed, rewrote, debugged and learned by doing.
Today, I'm doing exactly the same thing.
The tools have changed.
The mindset hasn't.
Why Jamaica Needs Educational Games
Imagine a Jamaican child learning about the Maroons by negotiating treaties instead of memorising dates.
Imagine understanding the Morant Bay Rebellion by making impossible decisions under impossible conditions.
Imagine building a free village after Emancipation and discovering, through gameplay, why land ownership mattered so profoundly.
Imagine Caribbean history becoming something students discuss long after class ends—not because they have an exam tomorrow, but because they couldn't stop playing.
This is bigger than entertainment.
This is cultural preservation.
This is digital heritage.
This is education that refuses to be boring.
Building in Public
These projects are still prototypes.
They're messy.
They're experimental.
They're unfinished.
But ideas don't become reality by hiding inside hard drives.
So I'm sharing them.
Explore the demos:
• History Game Prototype:
https://yahnyk.github.io/History-Game/
• Other History Game Experiments:
https://yahnyk.github.io/other-history-games/
• Free Village RPG Prototype:
https://yahnyk.github.io/Free-Village-RPG2/
Every click, every suggestion and every piece of feedback helps shape what these projects might eventually become.
A Caribbean Dream
My hope isn't simply to build games.
My hope is to help build a Caribbean game-development culture rooted in our own stories.
We've spent decades consuming other people's myths.
Perhaps it's time to export our own.
Jamaica possesses one of the richest histories on Earth.
The Caribbean is overflowing with stories of resistance, resilience, migration, innovation and imagination.
Those stories deserve to exist not only in textbooks and museums, but on laptops, tablets, consoles and phones around the world.
If these prototypes inspire one student to love history...
If one teacher decides to use them in a classroom...
If one young Jamaican decides they too can become a developer...
Then every late night has been worthwhile.
Help Me Build the Next Chapter
Independent projects like these take time, research, testing and countless hours of experimentation.
If you believe Caribbean stories deserve innovative educational games...
If you want to see these prototypes evolve into polished classroom tools...
If you'd simply like to support an independent Jamaican creator trying something different...
You can help.
☕ Support on Buy Me a Coffee:
https://buymeacoffee.com/yahnyk2099
❤️ Or donate via PayPal:
https://www.paypal.com/donate?token=jOFxdH0wu5zz6thF6AEZcjAu0Qh2vflf0CcBCBlAStCCyGahxd97YrKhMP973CInxFVjsvSjybQWLp9D
You aren't just funding games.
You're helping build a new way of telling Caribbean history.
One decision.
One student.
One line of code.
One story at a time.
