Blast from the past: Make your own games in BASIC [I Heart Tech]

When I was a kid, I really really wanted to be a programmer. I would get every issue of 3-2-1 Contact magazine and carefully copy their games in BASIC from the back and learn what worked and what didn’t work and even wrote a few simple games of my own. However, it turned out that I really don’t have the patience for coding and I was much better at visual art than programming, so I dropped it and that was that.

BASIC is… well, basic. It lacks all the complexities and nuances of something like C++ and some people barely consider programming in BASIC to be “real programming”, but it’s a great way to familiarize yourself with the practice and principles of coding–connecting statements so that they’re balanced and make sense, debugging, creative problem-solving, and the most essential– staring at chunks of code until your eyeballs dry up with your trusty can of Mountain Dew by your side. My machine of choice (er, or my only available one) was a TI-99/4A as shown above. There are many that still write games in Basic or the more evolved Visual Basic for mobile devices or just for kicks, but there was a good amount of fun in writing your own or even copying crappy little ASCII-based games and seeing them spring to life in no time.

Before you begin, you’ll need a BASIC compiler (or interpreter) and you can find a huge list of free programs for the PC and the Mac to do this here.

Even though BASIC was intended to be a standardized programming language, many people have taken liberties with the language over the years. You may need to change some of these programs in order to make them work on different BASIC platforms. 

Here’s one of those “you people have it easy these days” moments: When I was a wee lad, I didn’t have such luxuries as the Internet or an operating system with multiple windows or copy and paste, so it’s a little easier now. The following programs you can just copy and paste into your BASIC compiler of choice and they should run perfectly, but that’s easymode shit. If you truly want the full retro 3-2-1 Contact programming experience, you can print them out and then spend an hour or so painstakingly copying each line by hand and then try to figure out where you left out a symbol. That’s the fun part!

Most of these programs are via Morecad.com from the book More Basic Computer Games from Creative Computing and written for Microsoft Basic, though they should (probably maybe) work in any BASIC compiler.  More or less.

I tried to find programs that were in 3-2-1 Magazine, but to no avail. For the most part, they were just programs they had written or had found somewhere and mailed into the magazine, so there were most likely some of these on the list in the magazine. To get you started, here’s a real simple one that’s not a game, but just a primer-level program that simulates flipping a coin:

print “flip program”
2 for y = 1 to 10
5 let c = 0
10 for x = 1 to 50
20 let f = int(2*rnd(1))
30 if f = 1 then goto 60
40 print “T”;
50 goto 100
58 rem c counts the number of heads
60 let c = c+1
70 print “H”;
100 next x
110 print
120 print “heads “; c; ” out of 50 flips”
125 next y
130 end

So if you’re ready to rock, here’s a good sized list of BASIC games for you to play with:

Battleship
Blackjack
Civil War - very good little Civil War battle simulator
Eliza - the original computer shrink in BASIC
Hamurabi - A cool kingdom building game
Haunted House
Hun Attack - Defend yourself against the waves of attacking Huns
Hunt the Wumpus - the original classic. There were several later graphical versions of this game, but this is it at its texty finest.
Lunar - One of the more popular BASIC games back in the day, you control a lunar lander
Mad Lib - the funny fill-in-the-blank ad lib generator
Market - a capital market simulator
Mastermind - the original codebreaking game
Maze - create and solve a maze
Russian Roulette
Star Trek - a very long game, but a very popular BASIC version of the adventures of the Star Trek crew
Tank - control tanks across a grid
Tic Tac Toe

ADDED BONUS!!11!

As an added bonus, Delsyd wrote this little program in Applesoft BASIC, which you can quickly try out using this online Java-based Applesoft BASIC compiler:

10 A$=”Twat Knuckle”
20 HOME
30 PRINT “Blow me,”A$
40 GOTO 30