101 BASIC Computer Games
24 comments
·April 21, 2025DigiEggz
It's so entertaining to just pour through the source for each game and read the language used at the time, like in the game instructions or result responses.
There's something refreshing about seeing things described in different ways than they are now. I always wonder if some long forgotten words of phrasings will make their way back into public consciousness.
vunderba
If you are craving a BASIC fix, I highly recommend getting a DOS emulator like DosBos-X and just installing a copy of Quickbasic 4.5 (which has a compiler among other niceties over the original Microsoft QBASIC). You can easily find it on the Internet Archive.
There are modern variants like QB64, but personally I find that BASIC really loses a lot of its appeal/flavor when you move from an interpretative language to a compiled one.
I made this a while ago and it ran beautifully in DosBox on my Mac:
3036e4
I prefer GW-BASIC 1.0, as open sourced by Microsoft a few years ago, but with some changes to make it possible to build it easily yourself:
https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC
Also do a pip3 install pcbasic to get this great reimplementation of BASICA/GW-BASIC done in python for modern systems: http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/
ForOldHack
I was craving a BasicA fix, so rather than run the ROM extractor on an IBM, I found the extraction program with them extracted. No 43-line mode like qbasic... :(.
chasil
I remember variants on this for several platforms by the authors:
Don Inman, Ramon Zamora, Bob Albrecht.
TRS-80: https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-TRS-80-Level-II-BASIC/dp/047...
TI-99/4a: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-TI-BASIC-TI-99-4A/dp/081...
Visual basic for dos: https://www.amazon.com/Visual-MS-DOS-Prentice-Innovative-Tec...
VIC-20: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-BASIC-User-Friendly-Guide/dp/0835...
Here is the full TRS-80 text: https://archive.org/details/trs-80-level-ii-basic-a-self-tea...
Who were these guys? They were all over the map.
wduquette
This exact book is how I learned to program, back in the late ‘70’s. Lots of good memories.
ForOldHack
This is the book on how to write practical games. If DEC had not shafted Ahl, I would have been on real DEC instead of an HP.
DEC could have ruled the world.
genghisjahn
I loved Amiga Basic. My first taste of programming without line numbers.
jasperry
Many happy memories of checking out books like this from my public library and trying to get the programs working on the C64. The BASIC dialect never matched exactly.
kreelman
Similar for me in my early teens. I used an Australian machine called the Microbee, https://www.microbeetechnology.com.au/classic-plus-kit-compu...
A clever friend of mine wrote BASIC games that he sold back then. I think they had a bit of Z80 assembler built into it too.... Can't remember what names of them were though.
The 'hires' graphics mode (511*255, monochrome) were encoded into sprites. There were only 128 characters from memory. There were all sorts of tricks to try and get around that issue.
The best games used the sprites plonked into char positions.
smackeyacky
The ‘bee was how a lot of us Australians of a certain age got into computers. The only real competition it had was the C64 as other things like the Apple II and IBM compatibles were just too expensive in comparison to that $399 intro price.
It was a bit weird to program for, as you said the basic was not quite the same as the popular platforms. It did mean you learned a lot about the machine itself, how memory was laid out, how to get those PCG graphics right.
It’s funny now to be able to see very similar cultures sprang up around less successful machines in other countries.
alisonatwork
Me too, except with the CPC. After going through enough of them, I got to a point I could flick through the book in the library and figure out what was going to work ahead of time, what could be adapted and what went way beyond my abilities (usually anything that shoveled machine code into DATA blocks). It was neat imagining the incredible capabilities of computers other than my own and then trying to figure out a way to make mine do something like it too.
dang
Related. Others?
Updating “101 Basic Computer Games” for 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273866 - Feb 2021 (65 comments)
NaOH
From your own 2023 comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36945046
Play Basic Computer Games in the Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377776 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)
Basic Computer Games (1978) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28572761 - Sept 2021 (12 comments)
Basic Computer Games (ported to C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, VB.NET) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188324 - Feb 2021 (3 comments)
BASIC Computer Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604142 - April 2019 (120 comments)
BASIC Computer Games (1978) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026063 - Feb 2015 (31 comments)
Atari Archives: BASIC Computer Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3200133 - Nov 2011 (23 comments)
BASIC Computer Games Book, published in 1978 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866103 - Nov 2010 (36 comments)
There's also
More Basic Computer Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41984335 - Oct 2024 (1 comment)
Basic Star Trek Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709559 - Jan 2025 (1 comment)
BASIC Star Trek Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070752 - Feb 2025 (2 comments)
Vintage Basic - Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25502018 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)
Narishma
Are any of the games any good?
ForOldHack
The game of life is still being persuied relentlessly, the lunar module program was cooked by a NASA drop-out. Hamarabi is about to get cooked. Monopoly I do not think can be published.
khazhoux
Would be better if the programs were JPGs that you had to type in
ForOldHack
MS Office OCR works great for this, it did the Rogue.c jpegs in no time, but there are missing routines. I wonder if an AI could fill the gap.
Mountain_Skies
A listing made on a dot matrix printer that contain PETSCII graphic characters might make it struggle. It'd be interesting to see if the LLM could infer the intended character.
ForOldHack
I ment fixing the missing code blocks, of would suppose that an LLM could fix the mangled code without OCR training...
I don’t see gorillas.bas — that was my favorite. I actually found my appreciation for writing code modifying lines of code in that game to make bigger explosions.