Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain is a 2024 3D platformer video game developed and published by Canadian indie studio Extremely OK Games for Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows. The game was developed during a week-long game jam, in which it released in celebration of the sixth anniversary of the 2018 video game Celeste. The game released January 29, 2024, acting as semi-sequel to that game and a continuation to its narrative.
The player controls Madeline, the protagonist from the first game, who has returned to Celeste Mountain in order to reunite with Badeline and contemplate overcoming a big step in her life. Many people who worked on Celeste returned for this game, including composer Lena Raine who released a new soundtrack for it. The choice to transform the Celeste formula into 3D gameplay came from investigating a Quake level editor. Fragments of the Mountain received positive reception, with critics praising the game for its difficulty and soundtrack, whilst criticizing the game for its clunky keyboard controls.
When the first personal computers were released in 1977, they each included a pre-installed version of the BASIC computer language along with example programs, including games, to show what users could do with these systems. The availability of BASIC led to people trying to make their own programs. Sales of the 1978 rerelease of the book BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl that included the source code for over one hundred games, eventually surpassed over one million copies.[44] The availability of BASIC inspired a number of people to start writing their own games.[3][30]
The 1982 ZX Spectrum was popular with hobbyist programmers in the UK.
Many personal computer games written by individuals or two person teams were self-distributed in stores or sold through mail order.[39] Atari, Inc. launched the Atari Program Exchange in 1981 to publish user-written software, including games, for Atari 8-bit computers.[45] Print magazines such as SoftSide, Compute!, and Antic solicited games from hobbyists, written in BASIC or assembly language, to publish as type-in listings.
In the United Kingdom, early microcomputers such as the ZX Spectrum were popular, launching a range of "bedroom coders" which initiated the UK's video game industry.[46][47] During this period, the idea that indie games could provide experimental gameplay concepts or demonstrate niche arthouse appeal had been established.[42] Many games from the bedroom coders of the United Kingdom, such as Manic Miner (1983), incorporated the quirkiness of British humour and made them highly experimental games.[48][49] Other games like Alien Garden (1982) showed highly-experimental gameplay.[42] Infocom itself advertised its text-based interactive fiction games by emphasizing their lack of graphics in lieu of the players' imagination, at a time that graphics-heavy action games were commonplace.[42]