alt Hacker NewsFor 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!
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Just 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.
> 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.
It 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.