Griffpatch

**Griffpatch** is a Scratcher who currently has the most followers in Scratch. He is known to make incredible games in Scratch. He makes many Scratch tutorials on his YouTube channel.

## History

### Early Life

He started programming in BBC Basic on an Acorn Electron when he was 8 years old along with his brother @Psiborg. He learned coding using books with help from his mom. He later used Amstrad 6128 (still programming in Basic), however this is when he learned Assembly. When he was 13, he used an Amiga A500 to allow him for the first time to make games. He programmed in Amiga Os and coded a few good games and without internet there is no way to be published. At this time he wrote a game called snail which he later recreated in scratch.

Then he took computer science and learned to program in Borland Pascal (now Turbo Pascal). He got his first PC in that time. Programming in Pascal slowed down his game development because it lacked the basic game libraries supported by Amiga OS on the Amiga. In 1996, griffpatch wrote 2 games using Turbo Pascal and Assembly. One of the game is called as Flagz a platformer game. All graphics and sound libraries were written in assembly directly accessing the graphics and sound hardware, etc. Even the graphics were hand drawn by himself using his own home coded graphics package.

At university, he studied computer science and hardware assembly. At his university, he had a big audience for his games, so he wrote his own graphics package (Pascal + Assembly) and created a network game called Shipfat, which became very popular in PC Labs. After he graduated, his game programming came to an end for that time as he got a job programming software in Java. In his free time, he played guitar and created music on his computer.

### Scratch Life

Several years later, around 2010 or 2011, his elder son's school announced that they were running a computer club and they were going to introduce Scratch. Griffpatch downloaded Scratch 1.4 so that he could teach his son some basics. At the time Scratch 2.0 was not yet released, so griffpatch never bothered about the website. However, he created a shared account for him and his son called griffpatch.

He started making projects in Scratch 1.4 and started feeling enjoyable to be creating games again. When Scratch 2.0 was in its beta state, he decided to make separate accounts for his children, and he officially became griffpatch. His earliest game that is still available is Pacman HD with full Ghost AI (Scratch 2.0). Then, he made a Scratch Cat walking animation for his game Scratchnapped that got featured twice. His followers and fame started increasing steadily, but it started accelerating when Scratchnapped was shared. Later, when he was thinking for his next popular game, he saw many Scratchers trying to recreate bits of Minecraft. Griffpatch had never played Minecraft, but he tried finding information about the game and checking some projects inspired by it. Soon, he made Paper Minecraft, which is very popular.

One of Griffpatch's most popular projects is Level Eaten, which is the 5th most popular project as of August 2022.

On his YouTube channel, griffpatch started making tutorials. In 2016, he made the Box2D extension for Scratch 2.0, which was updated in 2019 for Scratch 3.0. He also made a browser extension for Scratch 3.0 called Scratch 3 Developer Tools, which was forked in GitHub and eventually inspired a new updated browser extension called Scratch Addons, being maintained by several Scratchers, like @World\_Languages.

1. ↑ He has a tutor account called griffpatch tutor