TIS-100
BANGER · Strategy · 2015
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $6.99.
- Length
- 14.3h
- Value
- $0.49/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
Watch this gameOne alert when it is worth buying.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 102 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
TIS-100 is an open-ended programming game by Zachtronics, the creators of SpaceChem and Infinifactory, in which you rewrite corrupted code segments to repair the TIS-100 and unlock its secrets. It’s the assembly language programming game you never asked for!
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
The value story
October 2018 is where it bottomed out, at $1.74. It has been discounted 70 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 50 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 99 percent of its genre. Among the games closest to it, EXAPUNKS ($19.99, scores 90) and SHENZHEN I/O ($14.99, scores 93) both come in lower.
The math says it holds its tier up to $18.66, and you are being asked for $6.99.
2 of the 333 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 92 percent of the 516 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 15 percent of everything written about it.
14.3 hours to finish it, 36 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.5 times the campaign.
The drop-off
91% start to 1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
21 players online when we last checked, on Sep 29, 21:47 UTC.
Player counts from the Steam Web API.
What players say
Code like a REAL assembler nerd back in the day, on a spasm-powered clockwork abacus. From Hell. The only redundant aspect of this system. Because memory registers are for SIMPS. You're going to have to pull out all your knotty bits in the penultimate boss level Doom port challenge. Wozniak and Abrash were PUNKS.
I like this a lot as a person get more into computer concepts. These make for interesting thought exercises as one puzzle leads to the next. The documentation (player manual) is a bit difficult to parse through early on, but starts to make sense after a few reads and solved puzzles.
I would call this Zach's hardest programming game, because the space and memory restrictions are the tightest here that they are anywhere. On the other hand, the bar is therefore lower (also because it is an earlier project). The final level in the main campaign is a sorting algorithm. Like most of Zach's programming puzzles, I haven't yet finished the bonus campaign, but I come back every once in a while to finish...
Steam reviews, mixed to match its Steam ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
TIS-100 scores 96/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER) as of Oct 2, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/370360/tis-100Reviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 23, price as of Oct 1.
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