Category Archives: BASIC Games

Writing new games in BASIC is definitely a lost art. But I was drawn back to this forgotten medium. Back in 2017, I had put together plans to implement Tiny BASIC on an Arduino with a 4-row x 20-character LED display. I’d then adapt classic BASIC games to it. This was intended as an homage to the fun I had with BASIC machines in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’d converted a few of the games into Tiny BASIC when I got distracted by Michael Rieneck’s board game, Around the World in 80 Days. […]

Unlike many of my generation who learned to program one of the 1977 Trinity (Apple II, TRS-80, and and the PET 2001), I didn’t discover BASIC Computer Games until later (1983), in my high-school library. Of course, by then, I’d been typing in BASIC programs for years, from magazines, other books, and from dot-matrix listings shared by friends. By the time I discovered BASIC Computer Games, I’d seen many of the games in other forms, as each was effectively treated in the public domain and adapted by other programmers. But […]

I concluded my post Printouts as Games with “Next time, we’ll look at the primitive visualization tools that were packaged as ‘games’.” That was five years ago! So past time to write this. However, it turned out there were fewer visualization programs than I realized: Bounce, Life, Sine Wave, and 3D Plot. Bounce was a physics simulator that plotted the course of a red rubber ball. For Life, a user enters an initial pattern, which the system then iterates on repeatedly, emulating a changing population, without further input. The Wikipedia […]

While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and later in Creative Computing’s bestseller BASIC Computer Games, which went on to sell over a million copies. Unlike the 1955 boardgame Jotto, where players are told only how many letters are in the mystery word, WORD plays like Wordle, but with a text interface, providing information about what letters are in the mystery word and, of those, […]

Our family friends the Hansels were the first to get a videogame system, the Atari VCS. I remember playing Combat, Breakout, and later Space Invaders. My dad was jealous, but he ended up getting us the Bally Astrocade. This turned out to be a great system, and its BASIC was far better than the Atari’s (the Atari BASIC Programming cartridge limited programs to 64 characters!). The Wikipedia article on the Astrocade didn’t have many details about its BASIC, so I added a section on the language. To that point, I’d […]

Back in 1980, I created a computer game for my TRS-80 Pocket Computer, inspired by Tunnels & Trolls. Given the passing of Rick Loomis, I thought I would dig it out. As with T&T, I had attributes: ST (Strength), DX (Dexterity), and CN (Constitution, used for hit points). But I skipped LK (Luck) and CH (Charisma), and I used D&D’s WS (Wisdom) instead of T&T’s IQ (Intelligence). Like T&T, and unlike D&D, attributes could increase: in my case, quickly, after every monster, rolling three dice and if the total exceeds […]

As we discussed last time, while BASIC Computer Games became a bestseller because of microcomputers, the games themselves dated back to timesharing systems using teletypewriters. As a result, a few of this first generation of BASIC games produced printed output as the primary purpose or as the game itself. The most game-like of these was Amazing, which would generate a new, random maze that you could solve on the printout. AMAZING PROGRAM CREATIVE COMPUTING  MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY WHAT ARE YOUR WIDTH AND LENGTH? 10 ??? 10 .–.–.–.  .–.–.–.–.–.–. I        I              […]

When I first met Rick Dakan, one of the creators of City of Heroes, we talked about a class he’s teaching at Ringling College of Art and Design in the spring, “The History of Game Art.” The class starts with Spacewar! in 1962 but to my surprise doesn’t cover some of the BASIC games of the timeshare era (circa 1964 to 1976). Yes, some have “art” (in fact, some are only art). BASIC Computer Games, the first computer book to sell a million copies, is thought of as a collection […]

I was surprised that there was no easy way to play David Ahl’s classic book, BASIC Computer Games, in your browser. You can now play them here: Play BASIC Computer Games in Your Browser BASIC Computer Games sold over a million copies as microcomputer users in the 1970s and early 1980s typed its programs into their Commodore PETs, Apple IIs, and TRS-80s (among many other machines). I smashed up Ahl’s listings with Joshua Bell’s Applesoft BASIC emulator to make it easy for you to select any of these programs and […]