ZERO PAGE

You are contracted to write low-level microprocessor code for a government program. The puzzles are routine. The narrative is not.

ZERO PAGE is a 6502 assembly puzzle game played in a terminal. Fifteen main missions teach the instruction set, from load and store through bit manipulation to indirect addressing. Six bridge missions pace the second half. Three hidden missions live behind in-game clues that attentive play surfaces.

Each puzzle ships with a briefing and a debrief, both written in the register of the agency you work for. Field ballistics units. Suppression filters. Density scanners. Record processing. The bureaucratic language stays clinical. As the puzzles advance, the tone shifts from reassuring to terse to minimal. Read carefully and you see what the agency does.

 The build ships with the OPERATOR REFERENCE MANUAL, a 6×9 PDF in the same voice as the briefings. Instruction set, memory map, mission notes, and the parts that did not survive a contractor audit. Open it from the in-game menu.

This is the standalone 1.0. The free web version (15 puzzles, in your browser) stays free at its own page. The desktop build adds the 6 bridge missions, the 3 classified modules, offline play, and save tapes (`.6502` files) you can reload at any point.

24 missions total. Keyboard-first controls; mouse supported. Step through one instruction at a time, run until completion, or open the sandbox to write freeform 6502 outside the campaign. Phosphor green default with optional amber, scanlines, CRT bloom, palette tweaks.

Save tapes are plain text. Edit them by hand if you want.

Somewhere in there is a music video.