THE COLLECTOR
A maze game I built at 15 in Borland Turbo C++ under the studio name Shaved Adlabs Productions. Coins, bribes, bullets, high scores — the full arcade loop. It was DOS-only for years. Now it runs in your browser.
// PLAY IT
Runs the original compiled binary via js-dos emulation — not a rewrite, not a remake.
// THE GAME
The Collector is a top-down maze game. You navigate corridors, collect coins to raise your score, and manage a set of mechanics that were ambitious for a 15-year-old's side project:
Sweep the maze for coins to drive up your score.
Spend what you collect to buy your way past obstacles.
Shoot to survive; the high score table keeps you honest.
// FROM DOS TO BROWSER
The game was written in Borland Turbo C++ and compiled to a DOS executable. For most of its life it only ran on machines that could boot DOS or DOSBox.
Rather than rebuild it in JavaScript, I kept the exact original binary and run it through js-dos, a WebAssembly build of DOSBox. What you play here is the same bytes I compiled as a teenager — preserved, not reinterpreted.
"BUILDER AT 15, BUILDER NOW — SAME INSTINCT, DIFFERENT STACK."
I don't write briefs and hope. I've been shipping working software since before it was my job. The tools changed from Turbo C++ to Python and LLMs — the instinct to actually build the thing didn't.