Programmer's Challenge
Programmer's Challenge
So, way way back when... so far back that it was when they actually still did the mini-GDCs... I had this idea for a kind of comedy game show with programmers that we could do at conferences for a good time. I proposed it to some friends at CMP (then Miller Freeman) as something we could try at the Seattle mini-GDC, and they were all for it. So myself and Jeff Roberts wrote a bunch of funny programmer/game-industry questions, John Miles built this cool hardware buzzer contraption, and Chris Hecker wrote a little app for displaying the game board and questions.
Suffice to say, it was a huge hit, and we ended up doing it 3 more times at the big GDC to standing-room only crowds. I eventually got tired of organizing it and burning all me + Jeff's time coming up with all the questions, so we didn't do them anymore, but by popular demand it was brought out of retirement again in 2007 for one last big show.
Collected here are the complete question sets from all 5 Programmer Challenges, for your viewing pleasure. Unfortunately, they're in the source data format for Checker's app, so you might have to do some word-wrapping to read them :) But, it's all there. Keep in mind that a lot of the humor was in the fact that we revealed the multiple-choice answers one at a time, so you kind of need to be aware of that while you're reading through it to get the full effect. Additionally, with the later challenges, there was always a faux "introductory" round, where I would demonstrate to the audience how the game was played - so there's just titles for the categories, but no actual questions, for the first n categories in the file. With the exception of the first category, of course, whose first question is filled in as a demonstration.
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