The RPG long predates Gas Town.

Regarding Gas Town, see also https://yegge.ai/essays/the-shape-of-things-to-come/ :

> Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw

I hadn't seen the $122K figure mentioned previously. $87K for API-style pricing was mentioned in the above post, and ~$2,800/mo for multiple Claude Max accounts:

> My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max accounts, which for me work out to ~30x the list-price equivalent. So in reality I'm only spending about $2800/month out of pocket for my $87k "worth" of tokens. Though that number keeps growing alarmingly.

(He never seemed to provide numbers for Gas Town initially, whether what he paid, or what the API-style pricing would have charged, so it was interesting to get some actual figures. Sounds like a lot to me, but if he's genuinely getting multiple people's-worth of work out of it, then...)

(Also in the article: a little morsel of Emacs content, which was nice to see.)

that person seriously seemed mentally ill and it's very suspicious that we never get to see the outputs.