I started to learn programming when I was 13, when good programming books were hard to find and there was no internet that time. My progress was slow, I abandoned programming for about 10 years. But I love programming and Pascal, now on my free time I learn and do some programming.
The first language I learned was BASIC. Very slow, it forced me to learn some Assembly to write obj files for called from BASIC. I stopped learning Assembly after I found Pascal, it's much faster, it allows me to map graphics data directly to the memory and even write ASM code, which I never used.
If you finish reworking the game, please lets us know.