For those who don't know the story, Zachtronics had this game called Infiniminer[0], from which Notch apparently took the idea for block-based game[1]. From the words of Notch himself[2]:
"But then I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed. Building was fun, but there wasn’t enough variation, and the big red/blue blocks were pretty horrible. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style(...)".
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[0] - http://www.zachtronics.com/infiniminer/
[1] - https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Infiniminer
[2] - https://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minec...
It sounds like both you and fake-name might like Microcorruption: https://microcorruption.com/
I also really love Zachtronic's earliest games. IIRC there's one about designing ICs at the silicon level, and one about reverse engineering hardware.
> I really wish the games used an actual language or assembly opcode set. If I could play TIS-100 and practice ARM or AVR assembly, that would be amazing.
Yeah. A lot of Zachtronic's games and other programming/hacking type games really leave me with a similar hunger for something more realistic. So I ended up making a prototype of such an idea where you can find and exploit a bug in an emulated ARM core to unlock a door:
https://vimeo.com/271555947
EDIT: This was the early reverse engineering game that Zachtronics released: http://www.zachtronics.com/ruckingenur-ii/ it's free and short; worth a playthrough.
And this was the semiconductor game: http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the-peopl...
Of course Zachtronics is also indirectly responsible for Minecraft, so there's that too :P