When I was learning c++ in high school, I made a working 10x10 implementation of Conway's Life before I had learned about arrays.

Even then I didn't do it like this. Just had 200 variables for the front and back buffers, and one big function with individual checks for each grid coord variable to check it's neighbors.

Or maybe just sloppy vampires?

So we'll get another old game where everything looks oddly shiny instead of oddly dull?