[jimsmart]

In the case of his Beeb project, the 'interpreter' you speak of here is in fact a fairly full featured emulator. Although yes, the z-machine (Zork) is an interpreter of sorts.

But all of his other games - including the clones of arcade games - aren't emulators nor interpreters. They're just games, written from scratch (pun unintended), from the ground up, in pure Scratch.

After all, his day job is in fact games dev - and with 25+ years experience (I worked with him mid-90s), one could say he's a veteran in that field.

In reality, it depends on the what the game actually is, as to whether it is harder to implement than an emulator or an interpreter. e.g. I strongly suspect that Battleships was much easier to implement than the Beeb emulator was.