Take a look at this screen shot from an old IBM PC game whose filename
was “DONKEY.BAS” (the “.BAS” filename extension denotes that the
program was written in the BASIC programming language):
I will bet that I am the only human being who feels an old adolescent
twinge whenever I see this screen. The reason is that back in 1983,
when I was just shy of turning 16, I was reverse engineering this game
on my friend’s dad’s IBM PC when a girl interrupted me for my first
alcoholic drink and kiss. Had I not been at that machine, that
experience could potentially have been delayed by years (you must
remember that it was 1983, well before the Internet and geek chic made
nerds cool).
Today, I discovered that Bill Gates himself co-wrote DONKEY.BAS. If
Bill hadn’t written that cheesy little demo program, my personal
history would’ve been far less interesting. The girl, you see, was so
much trouble that the rest of the story, I’m afraid, is unbloggable.
Needless to say, the thought of ol’ Bill’s involvement in my first
kiss, however tangential, is a little irksome. I need to do a
double-shot of Crown Royal now.
Thank you, Bill…yeeeeesh.
If you want to play DONKEY.BAS or see its innards, check out this entry on IndieGameDev, where I’ve posted both an executable that’ll run on any Windows box (even XP!) and the BASIC source code.
