About Uphill Games
Uphill Games is not even a very small hobbyist gaming studio, just a team of one, aiming to make fun, educational retro games about seemingly small things taken from amazing real life. It is also the realisation of a boy's dream to be able to program a computer like his older cousin.
In the nineteen eighties, my cousins and I started writing a game on a ZX Spectrum: a tower block on fire, people on the roof, one helicopter to lift them off. My older cousin was a wizard: he made things happen on the screen and could make sense of the coding instructions I could barely decipher. We never finished it, but I never forgot it.
Then, some forty years later, I stayed at Cortijo del Cura, a small hamlet high on the mountain above Lanjarón in the Sierra Nevada, in southern Spain, and watched a real fire burning down in the Béznar valley. It was 2026, a year of many fires in Spain that destroyed villages and killed and displaced people. But many were also put out, and I came to admire the firefighters who came with helicopters, amphibious aircraft and fire engines, and put themselves between the fire and the people of the mountain.
My cousin's unfinished game and the mountain in front of me merged and became my first game. The tower block became a mountain, the roof became a ridge, and the helicopter took on the role of the commanding officer: it watches the conditions, including the temperature and the wind, and it can pick up water with a bucket, carry people, or direct the rest of the crew.
Special thanks to Mark van Wyk, without whom none of this would have happened. His encouragement led me to give it a go. Thanks Mark!
Because the things these games are about are genuinely interesting, and almost nobody gets to see them work. You can read that fire climbs a slope faster than it burns down one. It is a different thing to watch a fire you started run uphill towards a village while you decide, in the moment, whether this trip carries water or carries people. A game can teach a real system in a way a paragraph cannot, by letting you act inside it and feel what happens.
Uphill is the first game in the series. The second is about the acequias, channelling water across the dry mountainside to green it and grow crops. A game called Keystone Creatures comes after that.
Marcus Demetrius Link
Uphill Games is my idea. I am Marcus Demetrius Link, a writer, poet, ecological thinker, entrepreneur and hobby games developer. Alongside these games I run Ecological Intelligence, a software platform that uses satellite and GIS data to support regenerative agriculture.
Born in 1978, I grew up between Ireland and Germany, and I live on the edge of Dartmoor, in the southwest of England.
Everything here is free, with no advertising and no data collection about you. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to get in touch.