Casey Muratori teaches how to write a game from scratch in C, using nothing but OS libraries (no OpenGL, no DirectX, nothing), every weeknight, live.

http://handmadehero.org/

Quite interesting stream. Also already contains a handful of very good videos on C programming in Windows.

What's the point of that? Does he intend to make a text adventure?

Honestly though I did graphics programming sans any graphics libraries in windows many years ago so I speak with experience when I say that there's pretty much nothing to be gained by forgoing that stuff just for the learning experience. The windows API is a pain to work with when it comes to producing pretty much any kind of graphics.

Now if he were just developing the game for some really lightweight OS like DOS and wanted to teach people how the VGA hardware was invoked to create a game, I could see that, because I've also done that before and it's actually interesting and cool. But in this day and age it's silly to try something like that on a modern OS. This is why DirectX was invented in the first place, because programming games from scratch on windows used to suck so goddamn much.

Sorry if it seems that I'm just being hypercritical and nonconstructive, because I don't normally like to discourage things that are done for the sake of learning and stuff, but I couldn't get behind a project like this at all and anybody who knows the history behind this stuff would know there is nothing nostalgic about making games in windows without some kind of support libraries, whether they are SDL or DirectX or OpenGL or whatever. I wouldn't even try making a roguelike without something like the curses library.

I fully see your point, his decision not to use any graphics library at all is also my biggest problem with his project simply because I wouldn't really want to do that and therefore a huge portion of his streams will only be interesting to me in an academic manner, so to speak. However, he's a really experienced programmer both in general terms as well as regarding working with the windows API (even though he really hates it because, as you say, it is a pain in the ass, no matter what you wanna do with it), so I assume he knows what he's getting himself into.
I'm howeve really interested in how somebody who's got a lot of experience not only in programming in general but also in games programming approaches such a huge project all by himself.