EvanAnderson 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was more of a Nibbles[0] person. I played it with other people on my XT-class laptop in high school.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(video_game)

hdgvhicv 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve got the music in my head just from seeing it written down. And the sound effect from gorrilla.

Yeah it's very iconic. It’s actually the same melodic motif that’s played in the intro of GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS - it’s a short snippet from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Kind of reminds me of how most people don’t know “Korobeiniki” (Коробейники) by name, they just call it the Tetris song.

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EvanAnderson 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I love the 1812 Overture, in part, because it has artillery.

"Oh, yes-- I play in the orchestra. I am in the auxiliary percussion and artillery sections."

	▲	vunderba 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Haha, symphonies with accompanying armaments really make you appreciate where you’re going to be seated as an audience member.

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rzzzt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My favorite is MONEY.BAS

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gxd 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For 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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pavel_lishin 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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plasticchris 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My earliest coding memory is messing with the gorilla code to get an advantage playing this against my brother…

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tomcam 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At my age, getting my game back sounds fabulous

	▲	eastbound 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, when did we start messing with the code? We need to fix it?

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vunderba 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	ColdStream an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Basic and Qbasic represent a part of computer culture that has been lost a little bit. It was the idea of making computers programmable to almost anyone without having to have a deep knowledge of how the system works. I'm not saying we should go back to BASIC but that spirit of easy to build has been lost a little. Nowadays you need to pull in like 40 dependencies before things can get really moving. Yeah it is OK after that but the barrier to entry can be a little tough at times. This is the same complaint I have about multimedia on the web, Flash solved the issue in a terrible fashion but the core idea was great.

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bluedino 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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gxd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You could get a PC for a thousand bucks back then

In the United States... In a lot of countries, computers cost a lot more than that in the local currency which, together with lower salaries, made computers inaccessible to most people.

I remember seeing people playing GORILLA.BAS in computer stores...

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egypturnash 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

$1k in 1990 ~= $2.5k today.

	▲	ColdStream an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And that would get you a system that was fairly anemic even for then. There were still some 286 systems being sold then which was 2 full architecture leaps behind at a time when it was starting to become very important.

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QuercusMax 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Crystal Caves! I've been trying to remember the name of that game for ages! I never bought the full version but played the shareware endlessly...

	▲	Arainach 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's a (presumably) excellent modern port of it a available on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1330890/Crystal_Caves_HD/ I say presumably because I played their excellent Secret Agent HD port but haven't played Crystal Caves yet.

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TonyAlicea10 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

GORILLA.BAS got me into programming decades ago. I made an (admittedly partially vibe coded) homage this year: https://gameswithtony.com/gorillas/

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RankingMember 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

GORILLA and NIBBLES!

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jimt1234 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We used to do quick tests of PC builds with GORILLA.BAS. It was later replaced by the 'Doom test'.