A 20-year-old college student has rebuilt Portal, Valve’s 2007 space-bending game, from the ground up, on—wait for it—a graphing calculator. In a display that puts the old calculator versions of Mario and Tetris to shame, Alex Marcolina posted to a gaming forum and reddit on Sunday about his re-engineered version of Portal. It took three years to build and cannot, due to resource constraints on TI-83/84 calculators, execute more than 16 kilobytes of code.
When Marcolina set out to rebuild Portal on TI’s graphing calculator platform, he was 17. Now, he’s a 20-year-old game design major at UC-Santa Cruz who programs games mainly for computers, but likes to dabble in graphing calculator games on occasion because it’s “a fun challenge to make a game for a platform that is not supposed to even support games.“