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Octo: a Chip 8 Story
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About the game
Octo: a Chip 8 Story is a joke with a branching plot. The title screen shows an octopus, a big "OCTO" and the subtitle. Then the story begins with a question: "Start making your game now?" The two answers sit at the bottom of the screen, one for each of the Z and X keys: Start or Wait.
Starting leads to a screen of scribbled code and a new choice: work hard or slack off. Each branch has its own little scene, drawn in the same black-and-white CHIP-8 pixels, and the story eventually reaches one of several endings. It is a few minutes long, and it is meant to be played more than once to see the other outcomes.
The program calls itself "Chip8 Shovelware" in its source, and it seems to be a gentle joke about every programmer who has set out to make a game for a jam and found out that the hard part is sitting down to do it.
Playing it here
Octo: a Chip 8 Story is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a simple virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it. It uses the plain CHIP-8 instruction set and a small monochrome screen. It runs here in the Octo emulator, with the speed and colours chosen for it in the archive.
Click Play, press any key on the title screen and then pick the left (Z) or right (X) option on each screen to steer the story. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Any key | advance the title and text screens |
| Z | choose the option on the left of the screen |
| X | choose the option on the right of the screen |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Play it more than once. Different choices lead to different scenes and endings, and a run takes only a few minutes.
Read the labels. The words at the bottom of the screen, next to the Z and X marks, tell you what each key will do on that screen.
Credits and licence
Octo: a Chip 8 Story was made by SystemLogoff in 2015. The in-game text is in English. It runs here in Octo, the CHIP-8 development tool and emulator by John Earnest (MIT licence). The game is kept in the Chip8 Community Archive, which places everything in it in the public domain under CC0 1.0. The licence text is linked from this page.