Ported the 1999 game Bugdom to the browser and added a bunch of mods
Details
- External ID
- 46941138
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Ported the 1999 game Bugdom to the browser and added a bunch of mods
- Website domain
- reallyeli.com
- Launched
- Feb. 9, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 23
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7129380053908356
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I think the very first video game I ever played was Bugdom by Pangea Software, which came with the original iMac. There was also a shooter called Nanosaur, but my 7-year-old heart belonged to the more peaceable Bugdom, which featured a roly-poly named Rollie McFly needing to rescue ladybugs from evil fire ants and bees.Upon seeing the port to modern systems (https://github.com/jorio/Bugdom), I figured it should be able to run entirely in-browser nowadays, and also that AI coding tools "should" be able to do this entire project for me. I ended up spending perhaps 20 hours on it with Claude Code, but we got there.Once ported, I added a half-dozen mods that would have pleased my childhood self (like low-gravity mode and flying slugs & caterpillars mode), and a few that please my current self (like Dance Party mode).EDIT: Here are some mod/level combinations I recommend* https://reallyeli.com/bugdom/Bugdom.html?gravity=0.3&video=s...* https://reallyeli.com/bugdom/Bugdom.html?level=3&visual=2&gr...* https://reallyeli.com/bugdom/Bugdom.html?level=8&flying_slug...
Enrichment
- Theme
- indie hacker passion projects
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- browser-based retro game with mods
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Porting a legacy 1999 3D game written in C/C++ to WebAssembly/Emscripten requires deep reverse-engineering of vintage Mac/PC binaries, graphics APIs, and memory management that AI coding assistants cannot independently accomplish.
What it would actually take: A real version requires decompiling or obtaining the original source code (Pangea Software open-sourced parts of their catalog), porting OpenGL/QuickDraw 3D graphics calls to WebGL via Emscripten, and restructuring asset pipelines for browser loading. Modding hooks require deep knowledge of C/C++, game engine architectures, and binary/memory manipulation. This demands specialized retro-gaming and graphics systems engineering expertise.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Nanosaur
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 176 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #56 of 177 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 94 days after the earliest competitor.
- Curvytron 2, I rewrote my browser party game, 10 years later · hn · 2026-06-30 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I left my FAANG job at 50 to build a sci-fi game · hn · 2025-11-07 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript · hn · 2026-05-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- 2D RPG base game client recreated in modern HTML5 game engine with AI · hn · 2026-03-10 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Vibe-coding video games with Claude (Day 14: Tetris) · hn · 2026-04-27 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Reverse-engineering Shockwave to save early 2000s web games (Rust/WASM) · hn · 2026-03-08 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- DanceJump For YouTube · hn · 2026-01-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Quake in the browser, with procedurally generated levels · hn · 2026-06-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.