I was recently playing a commercial Atari game from 1981 called "Ricochet" that was written in BASIC, which came on a cassette. Atari BASIC stored its programs

I was recently playing a commercial Atari game from 1981 called "Ricochet" that was written in BASIC, which came on a cassette. Atari BASIC stored its programs in memory using a tokenized format - it did syntax checking when the line was typed in, and then the tokenized form was stored to save memory. There was a table of variable names, indexed by token. So a quick and easy obfuscation technique was to overwrite the variable names with something like just carriage returns, so that when you LISTed the program it had no variable names and lots of extra line breaks. As I recall, at least. Haven't reinforced those memories in a while.