About · Games Explained

Who runs it

I’m Aaron Bell, air on GitHub. I’m an engineer and a lifelong Commodore fan. I owned the C16, C64 breadbin and Amiga 500+ over the years.

In 1991 I was fourteen, and I read a caption in Commodore Format that stuck with me for years: “You can’t get this colour on a 64! Well, you can if you swap pale green and cyan 50 times a second!” Twenty-six years later I wrote it up with interactive examples as Secret colours of the Commodore 64. It reached the front page of Hacker News in 2017, and again in 2023.

Between 2012 and 2017 I rebuilt Encounter – Paul Woakes’s 1984 game for Novagen – in the browser. I wrote it by hand in WebGL (long before coding agents) and read the sound data straight out of the C64’s memory. You can play it; the devlogs and the source are public too. This site’s Encounter page explains the original from its code.

Why I started it

I started Games Explained in September 2026. Coding agents had made it possible for anyone to reverse engineer their favourite games, and enthusiasts were publishing write-ups all over the web. Some of them are great. But they’re scattered and hard to find, and every project starts from scratch, rediscovering the same tricks.

The site sets out to supply what’s missing: somewhere to find the content, a kit that turns you into a reverse-engineering expert, and guidelines for turning source code into delightful content.

Existing sites like Lemon64 and C64-Wiki already catalogue and celebrate the games – we respect them and never duplicate.

Principles

The goal is human joy

As a consumer: read and play, to immerse yourself in the game you treasure.

As a contributor: research and write, to share your excitement for the game you love.

Embrace and respect the C64 ecosystem

Link and boost, never scrape or duplicate.

We wouldn’t be here without Lemon64 and the greats.

Anti-slop, pro-human

Joy means joy in reading, which means we care about writing. The writing on every minisite deserves as much craft as the reverse engineering.

Agents can kickstart the content, but we take multiple passes to de-slop and encourage a human voice.

Tiers

Every game has a completion tier: how far the work has got, and how human it is.

Tier	What it means
bronze	A partial run. The game boots, its features are listed, and some of its code is explained.
silver	Every byte of the program is accounted for, every fact has been traced or confirmed, and the minisite is built. It’s all agent work, labelled as draft, with an invitation to edit.
silver (claimed)	A person has started editing a Silver page – give them space to polish it up.
gold	A person has gone through the minisite to cut what’s dull, expand what’s interesting and punch up the writing.
platinum	The annotated source reassembles byte for byte into the original program, and the rebuilt game boots.

What this site is not

No game files. We don’t host disk images, ROMs or snapshots.
No aggregation – respect other sites. Each game’s About tab links out to great websites we love. No scraping.
Credit where it’s due. Contribute to a platform, a kit, a game – you’re credited under your GitHub account.

Questions

Is this going to disappear?: Nope. Everything is in a public repository under open licences, and the content is deliberately forkable, so the work doesn’t depend on any one person, me included.
Is it only for the Commodore 64?: We’re proving it on the C64, but it’s designed to expand beyond that. The status page lists the other machines and how to add a new platform.
Aren’t you sucking the joy out of this by using agents?: We don’t require agents for reverse engineering, but they’re by far the most efficient way to do it. Our first principle is human joy. If you want to do it by hand, go for it!
I’ve written about a game on my own site. Will you copy it / include it?: We’ll link to it. Every game’s About tab has a list of other places to love that game: tell us about yours on Discord, or add it to the game’s game.json in a pull request.

Get involved

I want your help to reverse engineer every C64 game (for starters). All you need is a GitHub account and a coding agent, plus your own copy of the game. We provide the rest. Pick your favourite game and tell your agent:

Please clone https://github.com/gamesexplained/gamesexplained and follow kit/START.md

Or come and say hello on Discord.

Aaron Bell · air