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For those who don't know why GORILLA.BAS is so cool... Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available. Sometimes a parent would b
by gxd 2mo ago
For those who don't know why GORILLA.BAS is so cool... Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available. Sometimes a parent would buy a computer for word processing or spreadsheets or take kids to the office which also had business computers. Children were curious about the computers but there wasn't really anything fun to do with them besides banging on the keyboard...
...Until you found the BASIC dialect that came with MS-DOS, that is! GORILLA.BAS was bundled with DOS and was a fun little game you could play in those computers. It's not like you could access web games on the Internet - there was no Internet!
- pavel_lishin 2mo agoIt was also a very educational experience to start messing with the code until you broke it - forcing you to figure out how to fix it, to get your game back.
- tomcam 2mo agoAt my age, getting my game back sounds fabulous
- eastbound 2mo agoYes, when did we start messing with the code? We need to fix it?
- plasticchris 2mo agoMy earliest coding memory is messing with the gorilla code to get an advantage playing this against my brother…
- Induane 2mo agoMy first ever hack was turning off collision detection in nibbles.bas so I could worm right through walls.
- inigyou 2mo agothis reminded me I gave myself infinite lives in a GNU version of Nibbles (not really the same game but a drastically expanded one) so I could see all the levels.
- Storewide 2mo ago[flagged]
- bluedino 2mo ago> Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available. You could get a PC for a thousand bucks back then, and shareware was a thing in 1990-91. Crystal Caves, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem were huge hits and there were tons of less popular games...not to mention copying commercial games from friends.
- QuercusMax 2mo agoCrystal Caves! I've been trying to remember the name of that game for ages! I never bought the full version but played the shareware endlessly...
- Arainach 2mo agoThere's a (presumably) excellent modern port of it a available on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1330890/Crystal_Caves_HD/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1330890/Crystal_Caves_HD/ I say presumably because I played their excellent Secret Agent HD port but haven't played Crystal Caves yet.
- inigyou 2mo agoThere are also infinite clones of it. But I'm not aware of any open source one yet
- egypturnash 2mo ago$1k in 1990 ~= $2.5k today.
- ColdStream 2mo agoAnd that would get you a system that was fairly anemic even for then. There were still some 286 systems being sold then which was 2 full architecture leaps behind at a time when it was starting to become very important.
- gxd 2mo ago> You could get a PC for a thousand bucks back then In the United States... In a lot of countries, computers cost a lot more than that in the local currency which, together with lower salaries, made computers inaccessible to most people. I remember seeing people playing GORILLA.BAS in computer stores...
- vunderba 2mo agoJust as importantly - it was an all‑in‑one. I think a lot of people tend to forget that there were already plenty of earlier BASIC dialects (GW‑BASIC, Apple II BASIC, C64 BASIC, etc). However QBASIC was likely the first freely available, all‑in‑one "batteries included" environment that came bundled with MS‑DOS 5 with a relatively friendly IDE that had built‑in help for every single command. GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS were the gateway drugs for many future programmers.
- ColdStream 2mo agoBasic and Qbasic represent a part of computer culture that has been lost a little bit. It was the idea of making computers programmable to almost anyone without having to have a deep knowledge of how the system works. I'm not saying we should go back to BASIC but that spirit of easy to build has been lost a little. Nowadays you need to pull in like 40 dependencies before things can get really moving. Yeah it is OK after that but the barrier to entry can be a little tough at times. This is the same complaint I have about multimedia on the web, Flash solved the issue in a terrible fashion but the core idea was great.
- vunderba 2mo ago100%. I actually loved Flash for what it was. I get that it could definitely become convoluted especially when you were jumping between various keyframes, some of the control flows could get really messy. But just like QBASIC, it was a “batteries included.” environment. That’s what made it so compelling. QBASIC was the same way. It's a literal siren song for inquisitive kids to just experiment, because everything is right there. Like you said, there’s no importing libraries. It’s a completely self-contained sandbox of possibilities. If you have a question, you just slap that F1 on your buckler-spring mechanical keyboard and boom there’s documentation/examples.
- pjmlp 2mo agoOnly if you ignore the 8 bit home computers, we got all BASIC interpreters and machine code for free with each one. And there were "IDEs" that sometimes were offered in cover tapes, at the expense of even lesser RAM, I got one for the Spectrum. And the 8 bit computers with at least 128 KB, already could run CP/M, which opened the door for better BASICs, including compilers.
- rossriley 2mo agoIt sounds kind of crazy now but we genuinely used to buy computer magazines that had basic code printed in them, to try the game you would type the basic into a file, save and then run it.
- pjmlp 2mo agoBefore that we had the BASIC dialect that came with ROM on power up. :) And this is how we got many of our games from the local library, or bookstore, Atari as example, but similar existed for the other 8 bit home computers, https://www.atariarchives.org https://www.atariarchives.org