I just found out there is a mini casual-game genera called “Falling Sand Games“, based upon a Japanese programmer’s game from 2005 ish.

The funny thing is, I remember writing a very similar “game” back in about 1986, on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, with help from my friend John Lord. Unfortunately no trace of this original version remains. A couple of years after I converted it to the Atari ST, and eventually in about 1992 it was one of the first programs I wrote on the PC, in assembly language. The screenshot to the right is a photo of my screen today, I can’t figure out how to do a screen capture of a mode-x program.

Here’s the Executable: snow.exe (which does not work on Windows Vista, bah humbug!), it’s 45K because it contains a lot of other code because I dumped all my PC toy programs into one source file. The original PC version was about 6K of code.

Here’s the source: ALL.ASM, it’s also got the source for a load of other programs, like a simple cloth simulator, Brownian motion, and fireworks.

It runs in full screen “Mode-X”. Draw lines with the mouse, left click to draw lines, right click to erase. Press the spacebar to start the snow falling.

The earliest evidence of this on the internet is my Neversoft web page back in 1998, from archive.org.