[endgame]

Yeah, I spent more time than I cared to admit fiddling with DEVICE(HIGH) lines, tweaking FILES= and BUFFERS=, running MEMMAKER.EXE over and over as if that would do something, but it was never the real thing. The real thing is making the machine do something I wanted instead of what the manufacturer wanted. For a kid of this generation, I'd look for games with reasonable modding APIs, perhaps something like Lua, and ideally something where playing multiplayer lets him show his creations off to his friends.

From there, look to packages like LÖVE which still use Lua but give full control over the whole game, and help him explore and wrangle the things he needs to understand to make his programming real. And if the lower levels interest him, help him dig deeper. But I think modding and scripting is probably the best place to start.