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BASIC Computer Games: Microcomputer Edition

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This was the beginning for many people to their love affair with computers. Many simple games that you program yourself in Basic, one of the first computer languages. Not only could you learn simple progamming form this book, but have something tangible to show for it! Easy to use with set-by-step instructions.

Back in the Golden Age of Microcomputing (roughly from '75 to '89 or so) the way people shared programs wasn't through the internet. Instead, it was through typing in program listings in the backs of magazines. "Compute!'s Gazette" was my means of getting software.

When I recently came across a copy of Ahl's "Basic Computer Games" I had to snatch it up immediately. There, contained in 101 program listings are games of varying degrees of quality, but many the games from that Golden Age are in there. Especially that Star Trek(TM) game. [Star Trek is a trademark of the Paramount Pictures Corporation]

Many of the games are just plain silly. Who knows why Ahl included them? Bunny, Poetry, Combat, just to name a few. But there are enough good ones in there to elicit a wave of nostalgia in those of us who lived through (and gamed through) those golden times.

In the late 70's/early 80's I used to play a lot of these games at the local Chelmsford Mall, which had an outlet for Digital computers. When I saw this book I had to have it so I could get all of those games working on my 1984 Atari 8-bit computer. Part of the experience of this book was porting to your home computer's non-standard variant of BASIC, sort of a geek learning experience. I still have this book in my basement.

FYI This entire book is legally available online at the AtariArchives site. The copyright owners released some of their rights so it could be scanned and placed online.

All of these are great classics deserving to be ported to different micros, APIs, and programming languages. I'm porting a couple of these to Arduino just for kicks.

I never did make it throughout all the 101 games. They were designed on Microsoft 8K Basic Rev.4.0. David H. Ahl is the Founder of "Creative Computing" Magazine.

By typing in the game you learn how the basic code controls may code functions and algorithms. Like many other technical items this information has been sway surpassed by the industry but it is still fun to mix and match code. Also today you can try to translate the games into "C". It is fun to play early versions of "Star Trek".