Well, a while before that, i wrote own lobotomized smalltalk implementation in C and started generating bindings to Ogre3D engine. I even had certain success with it, but then i started grand-rewriting of VM and abandoned it.
That was before i switched to Squeak, then Pharo. So, your incentives quite familiar to me :)
I was quite fun journey, and i learned a lot while doing it.. especially about smalltalk.��

I don't understand why people find assembly scary or mind-boggling? I dived into assembly few months after i learned my first programming language, it was Zilog 8-bit CPU. A marvelous gem :)��
And this was always fascinating to feel that you can control the computer's behaviour down to a tiniest detail. We were even researching what certain i/o ports and interrupts were responsible for by setting different bits/bytes here and there and see what happen.��
Because if you don't understand something down to the tiniest detail - you cannot be sure that what you doing will work, or work optimally.
So i find it frustrating that most of programmers don't know and not even thinking about touching assembly. Because it very simple, straightforward and megalomaniac-rewarding :)

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Best regards,
Igor Stasenko.