Middletown High School South Graduate Wrote His Own Video Game, Now Playable Online

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — Everyone's familiar with the image: A bunch of college students lounging in a dorm room, playing video games.

But this young man who grew up in Middletown, NJ took it one step further: He and his college roommates invented their own video game.

Benjamin Adams, 20, is about to enter his junior year at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. Although his parents have since moved to Vermont with him, he grew up in Middletown and graduated in 2024 from Middletown High School South, where he was in the marching band and played the trumpet.

Adams loves video games and computer programming. He chose Champlain College because, while he was still in high school, he attended a summer camp on the campus where teenagers learned to code.

He liked it so much he returned to Champlain for college.

"I was in my freshman year, having a great time and my roommates and I were playing an Adobe Flash game on my computer," he recalled. "It was a really old game where you could build your own levels and play them. We were like, Wow this is so fun. Why don't we build a game like this?"

Using video game development software called Unity, they invented a video game they named MAGE. MAGE is online gaming slang for a magician or wizard, and MAGE is a multi-player game that allows players to compete as different wizards.

"It's really fun; you fly around and shoot spells at each other," said Adams. "You use a joystick. We initially made the game to run on a computer and you connect the joystick with a USB cable."

"Throughout freshman year, we kept playing around with the game but it didn't go too far," he admits. "We didn't know what we were doing with programming at the time. Programming is like building a house. If you don't have a strong foundation, you can't build onto the house. It will just fall apart."

"At the start of our sophomore year, we decided to entirely remake it," he said. "The programming classes I took my sophomore year really helped me write the code. I first learned how to write code in an AP computer science class I took at Middletown South. That kind of coding isn't exactly the same as what we are doing today, but a lot of the logic is similar. I learned a lot of principles from that AP computer science class I took in high school."

At the end of sophomore year, they set a goal: They would release MAGE on a professional video-game streaming site called Steam.

"We worked on MAGE all the time," he said. "Every time we were done with our schoolwork, it was like, OK time to work on MAGE. But working on MAGE never felt exactly like work. It felt like fun. Even if I had just done schoolwork for five hours, I always felt like I could work on MAGE."

The four college kids also formed their own video-game company called FunRug Studios, named after one of the rugs in their dorm room (don't judge it; remember Steve Jobs founded Apple from his parents' garage). They're also in a foam sword-fighting club at Champlain College.

MAGE was released on Steam June 27 and it currently available here: store.steampowered.com/app/4459080/MAGE_Mega_Awesome_Gregarious_Encounters/

It's $9.99 to download the game and so far they've had 604 downloads. Steam keeps 30 percent of the profits for hosting it and FunRug Studios keeps the remaining 70 percent. Currently, MAGE is only able to be played on computers, but they're working to get it available on PlayStation.

"It's really cool to see our game hosted alongside video games from the biggest studios in the world, like EA (Electronic Arts), the makers of Madden," he said. "Steam is great. Other than their huge marketing budgets, there's no special treatment on Steam for the big studios. It's really cool they host us."

Adams and his friends are currently working on developing a new video game, where players pretend to be fish and up to 12 people can play at a time.

His favorite thing about video games, funnily enough, is how social they are.

"A lot of people out there are making single-player games," he said. "But if you make multi-player games, like MAGE, you get a lot of fun and laughter out of it. It's really social."

But can't AI apps like ChatGPT or Claude just write video game code themselves, and remove hours of work?

"No way," Adams replied. "Right now, AI can write code but it doesn't understand the full scope of the game you are trying to create. It doesn't understand the nuances of the game."

"There are a lot of people my age saying AI sucks," he continued. "That's the beauty of a video game. It's the same thing as a life-changing book or a movie — done right, a video game is a piece of media that stays with you, and can change your life."

"Nobody in my generation wants AI in the creative space. Only humans know the human experience."

The four inventors of MAGE and owners of FunRug Studios, all enrolled at Champlain College:

Maxwell 'Max' Totten - from Hamilton, Bermuda

Harrison 'Harry' Tomasco - from Chester, New Jersey

Alexander 'Alex' Weiswasser - from Longmeadow, Massachusetts

Benjamin ' Ben' Adams - from Middletown, New Jersey