I wrote The Alphabet Game at school with help from good mates Pete and Tim. It opened with an intro screen and a voice announcing "The Alphabet Game by Gez, Pete and Tim", then dropped you at a command prompt. You typed the alphabet as fast as you could and hit enter. If you got it right, you got a time. If not, you got nothing. It was dead simple, but at school it became wildly popular, and some of the times people posted were stupidly quick. I've since lost half a finger in a machine accident, so I doubt I'll get anywhere near them now. But the alphabet still hasn't gotten any longer, and the time has come for The Alphabet Game to be reborn. GET YOUR NAME ON THE TABLE!
The Alphabet Game puts that drill back on the heap. Twenty-six letters. One clock. The quickest clean runs go on the table.
What you already know
You know the alphabet. That is the whole skill. The game is whether you can get it out of your hands before your head starts helping. A fast run is a few seconds. A careful run is already too slow.
The twist: when you are allowed to know you are wrong
The prompt sits over the alphabet. Letters you land stay green. Hit the wrong one and it stays in the prompt in red, and the alphabet marks the spot. A letter played too early or too late is out of order. The letter you jumped is missed. Both stay red through the finish, so the end screen shows where it went wrong.
A counted run is a clean alphabet. One wrong letter, and the time stays off the table.
How a run works
The clock starts on the first letter, so you can set your hands before you spend any time. Enter finishes early, and any letter still waiting is missed. Escape abandons a run. Backspace lifts the last letter. M mutes the music when you are not in the middle of the alphabet, because M is a letter and the alphabet needs it more.
If the time is clean and quick enough, you get a name on the table. If it is clean and short of the last seat, you still see where the bar sits. If it is dirty, you see exactly where it went wrong.
Why this one belongs on the heap
It passes the one-line test: type the alphabet flat out, except you can finish the whole line before the game tells you that you missed a letter. Familiar drill. One cruel delay. That was enough the first time I wrote it, and it is enough now.
If you want the original argument back, play it here. Type it. Hit enter. Then look.