SAS is a serious language for serious work: statistics, data management, clinical trials, regulatory reporting. Which is exactly why, for nearly two decades, SAS users have been unable to resist proving a point — that a language which can model a survival analysis can also model a deck of cards, a sudoku grid, or, in one glorious case from 2008, a first-person shooter. I went digging through the SAS Support Communities archive, the sasjs-app repos on GitHub, SAS-L lore and this blog’s own history to catalogue every SAS game I could find. Here they are, in chronological order.

2008: Wolfensäs, the SAS first-person shooter

The crown jewel of SAS games, and it’s not close. In 2008, SAS programmer Mark Paschalidis announced Wolfensäs on the SAS-L mailing list: a Wolfenstein 3D-style first-person shooter, written in and for SAS 8.2 on Windows XP, complete with network multiplayer. The code runs to over 5,000 lines of SAS across 14 files, with macro routines like %addwallsmoke and %drawprojectiletracers, plus direct memory access via CALL POKE and system calls via CALL MODULEN — which is why it only ever ran on 32-bit Windows SAS, and why SAS Studio or Enterprise Guide users need not apply.

Fifteen years later Chris Hemedinger resurrected it on SAS 9.4 under Windows 11 — accidentally installing the 32-bit version turned out to be the key — and confirmed the mechanics and sound still work. The download lived on Mark’s site (wolfensas.subshock.net) as of late 2023, though the domain has since lapsed.

2011–2016: the forum game era

The SAS Support Communities programming boards became the natural home for games-as-posts, and one user — FriedEgg — basically ran the arcade:

• Craps (2011). Craps — Game Simulation: the full dice game, come-out roll and all, in the DATA step.
• Word games (2011). Also FriedEgg: word linkage puzzles (find the words linking play and table) and word ladders — the Lewis Carroll invention — as a hash object training exercise.
• Knights of the Dialing Pad (2012). FriedEgg again, with a knight’s-tour-on-a-phone-pad math puzzle.
• Big Data Overload (2013). Not a forum game, but its contemporary — and SAS’s first in-house game. A free iOS/Android app from SAS UK in which your score measured Good Decisions against Bad Decisions and Missed Opportunities, and power-ups were priced by ROI. Chris Hemedinger promoted it on the SAS Dummy blog (“Most people try to hide the evidence of their bad decisions. But this weekend I decided to share mine to social media”), complete with a video about the 5 Vs. It’s long gone now — the App Store and Google Play listings, the promo page and even the promo video are all dead links.
• Sudoku Puzzle Generator (2014). IanWakeling’s macro builds completed sudoku squares with a Markov chain algorithm — and it isn’t restricted to 9x9; it goes up to 25x25.
• Poker (2014–2017). Generate Poker Hands (brophymj, 2014) set out to rank Texas Hold’em’s 2,598,960 unique hands; Goonie’s ”Teaching my computer to beat me at poker” (2015) turned it into an AI learning project; and kbry1180’s Poker Simulation (2017) computed flush and straight probabilities from a shuffled deck.
• Blackjack (2016). ejohnson96’s PROC IML blackjack game, with play_hand() and supporting modules. The genre clearly has legs — in 2025 genemroz was still at it, using blackjack probabilities to work out how many hands you’d need to play to catch a stacked deck, building on Rick Wicklin’s card simulation posts.
• Table tennis (2016). RyanSimmons’ simulation of serve-switching rules — a game simulation born from a real-world rules question.

2017–2020: the community game era

• Sasensei (2017–c.2020). Full disclosure: this one’s mine. Sasensei was a question-based SAS learning game — tokens, belts, leaderboards, user-submitted questions — which launched in 2017, got the full SAS Global Forum treatment in 2018 (paper, presentation), and even ran a bitcoin challenge. It was decommissioned a few years ago (the domain now redirects to sasapps.io).
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020). Also mine, and the start of a second tradition: games deployed from SAS rather than written in it. The sonic repo streams an HTML5 Sonic game from SAS 9 — two lines of SAS (filename playme url ...; %inc playme;) build the web service and print the link in the log. Built with the SASjs framework to demonstrate app streaming from SAS.
• SAS programming “golf” (2018–2024). Chris Hemedinger ran a series of least-code-wins challenges on the communities: highest digit in a string of digits (2018) and ”Find the fake books” (2024), the latter complete with an AI-generated Proc Studley backstory and ISBN checksum validation.
• Advent of Code (2018–2021). jmhorstman did the whole 2018 Advent of Code in SAS; tc returned for Day 21 and Day 25 of the 2021 edition.
• Sudoku as an optimization problem (2018). ODENWALD timed batches of sudoku solves in PROC OPTMODEL, one 81-character puzzle per record. (Tower of Hanoi also shows up as a student assignment that same year.)
• The SAS Bowl (2020– ). SAS Communities launched monthly trivia — a live quiz with swag prizes, run by joeFurbee. It’s still going: SAS Bowl LXI ran in May 2026.

2021–2026: the Viya era

• Rock Roller (2021). A 3D endless-runner (ThreeJSEndlessRunner3D underneath), packaged by the SASjs team to demonstrate auto-deployment: download a release asset, run one SAS file on Viya or SAS 9 EBI, open the link in the log — a game served straight out of your SAS environment, no web tier. Source.
• Mario (2021). Same idea, bigger mascot: a Super Mario HTML5 game (by Garrett Johnson) streamed from SAS with a one-file deployment for Viya, SAS 9 EBI or SASjs Server.
• Chinese Chess (2021). Ksharp rendered a game of Chinese Chess in ODS Graphics. Fun With SAS ODS Graphics indeed.
• Wordle (2022). The year everyone played Wordle, so did SAS users. Chris Hemedinger’s implementation — code on GitHub, blog post here — runs in SAS for Windows, Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio on 9.4 or Viya. ChrisNZ then compressed the whole thing into a single %wordle() macro: run %wordle(help) for the help screen.
• Cortex (2022– ). The commercial end of SAS gaming: SAS’s own analytics simulation game, built on HEC Montréal’s ERPsim, in which teams compete to build predictive models for a fictional bank. It’s used by universities and businesses alike — there’s a good write-up of how play drives data science engagement, an introduction thread, and customers showing it off at SAS Innovate.
• SAS Hackathon Ideation board game (2024). SAS shipped hackathon teams a physical board game for brainstorming their projects. The hackathon itself keeps producing game-adjacent entries — 2024 included a team literally named Hunger Games and the NEAR Exergame rehabilitation project.
• LinkedIn Queens (2025). SubbuPaz solved the Queens puzzle — one queen per row, column and colour — as an integer program in PROC OPTMODEL.
• Monopoly (2026). gsvolba built a five-part digital twin of Monopoly in SAS Viya: Monte Carlo visit frequencies for every square, Go-to-Jail modelling, Chance and Community Chest cards, a Visual Analytics dashboard, and profit per field and player. It culminated in an Ask the Expert webinar on the whole thing.
• Macro Dash (2026). The newest one, and also mine — and the fullest evolution of the Sonic/Rock Roller/Mario lineage: dash.sasjs.io is a platformer where you play the DATA step — bounce through the WORK library, stomp ERRORs and WARNINGs, collect ampersands, grab the FORMAT 10.2 mushroom for super jumps. It runs standalone in the browser, or you can deploy it to your own Viya, SAS 9 or SASjs Server and compete for real on a persistent, server-side leaderboard. Source on GitHub.

Games as data

The other half of the tradition: analysing games with SAS rather than writing them.

• Game of Thrones (2015, 2019). A text analysis of the books from SCSUG 2015, and FalkoSchulz’s Visual Analytics episode and character analysis for season 8.
• The Witcher (2020). ChrisBrooks’ Free Data Friday article on video game popularity.

The scorecard

Year	Game	Author	Written in
2008	Wolfensäs (FPS)	Mark Paschalidis	Base SAS, 32-bit Windows
2011	Craps simulation	FriedEgg	DATA step
2011	Word linkage & ladders	FriedEgg	hash objects
2012	Knights of the Dialing Pad	FriedEgg	Base SAS
2013	Big Data Overload (mobile)	SAS UK	iOS / Android app
2014	Sudoku generator (up to 25x25)	IanWakeling	SAS macro
2014–2017	Poker sims	brophymj, Goonie, kbry1180	Base SAS / SQL
2016	Blackjack	ejohnson96	PROC IML
2016	Table tennis serve-switching	RyanSimmons	DATA step
2017	Sasensei	this blog	SAS web app
2018	SAS programming “golf”	Chris Hemedinger	communities challenge
2018	Sudoku solving	ODENWALD	PROC OPTMODEL
2018–2021	Advent of Code solutions	jmhorstman, tc	all SAS
2020	The SAS Bowl (trivia)	SAS Communities	live quiz
2020	Sonic the Hedgehog	this blog / SASjs	HTML5 streamed from SAS 9
2021	Rock Roller (3D endless runner)	SASjs	HTML5 streamed from SAS
2021	Mario	SASjs	HTML5 streamed from SAS
2021	Chinese Chess	Ksharp	ODS Graphics
2022	Wordle	Chris Hemedinger, ChrisNZ	Base SAS / macro
2022	Cortex	SAS & HEC Montréal	commercial simulation
2024	Hackathon Ideation board game	SAS	cardboard
2025	LinkedIn Queens	SubbuPaz	PROC OPTMODEL
2025	Blackjack probabilities	genemroz	Base SAS + stats
2026	Monopoly digital twin	gsvolba	Viya, Monte Carlo
2026	Macro Dash	SASjs	JS frontend + SAS services

Still missing

No Tetris. No Minesweeper. No Snake. Nobody has written a game in pure SAS since the Wordle era, and nobody has written an FPS since Wolfensäs. If you know of a SAS game I’ve missed — especially anything from the SAS-L era before 2008 — let me know and I’ll add it to the list.