When I was new to programming, and almost 100% self taught, I wanted to make a game. It was Q-BASIC, in about 1998. I made a top-down space shooter where you f

When I was new to programming, and almost 100% self taught, I wanted to make a game. It was Q-BASIC, in about 1998. I made a top-down space shooter where you fly a ship, and meteors and other objects come down the screen and you shoot them. Somehow, I had missed or glossed over the part of my self teaching that included arrays. I didn't know what that was. My program was written with variables like $ax1, $ax2, etc (asteroid X position 1), and collision detection was a big pyramid of "if $ax1 > $ax2 AND $ax1 < $ax2 + $awidth ...". I was always wondering how someone would write a program where there was some configurable number of things on the screen? What if I wanted to crank up the difficulty and have 20 simultaneous things moving!? So yeah, you can get a lot done with some really basic stuff.