Whether your chip is running a vintage computer game or the latest DeepSeek model, it’ll reward you for speaking its native language.

Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t the most fashionable computer game out there in 1999. But if you took a look beneath the pixels—the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the janitors mopping in their wake)—deep down at the level of the code, you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris Sawyer, the game’s sole developer, wrote the whole thing in assembly.

Certain programming languages, like Python or Go or C++, are called “high-level” because they work sort of like human language, written in commands and idioms that might fit in at a poetry slam. Generally speaking, a piece of software like a compiler transforms this into what the machine really reads: blocks of 1s and 0s (or maybe hex) that tell actual transistors how to behave. Assembly, the lowest of the “low-level” languages, has a near one-to-one correspondence with the machine’s native tongue. It’s coding straight to metal. To build a complex computer game from assembly is like weaving a tapestry from shedded cat fur.

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