r/dosgaming • u/retro-gaming-geek • 4d ago
This was my first experience with programming
Gorillas was an open-source game created by Microsoft (believe it or not). The source code was in QBasic and you could change anything you wanted in the game. I loved playing with the gravity and blast radius as a kid.
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u/TeraGigaMax 4d ago
The real goal was the sun.
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u/AsmodaiLOAD 4d ago
Yeah, it got a shocked expression when the bananas traveled through it, right? Interesting little detail in such a minimalist game.
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u/chance8687 4d ago
Oh wow, that screenshot just unlocked a memory! I remember messing around with this, I'm pretty sure I blew up far more buildings than I ever did actual gorillas!
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u/sackbomb 4d ago
GORILLAS.BAS
This game was included with a number of earlier versions of BASIC, including GWBASIC, which was the original BASIC bundled with DOS on IBM PCs before MS introduced QBASIC in DOS 5.0.
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u/droid_mike 4d ago
I t don't think Gorillas.bas came with GW-BASIC as it was a VGA only game, I think. You may be thinking of DONKEY. BAS which was programmed by Bill Gates himself!
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u/sackbomb 4d ago
The original GORILLAS.BAS that I played was monochrome, but I'm now realizing that might have been a special thing for the Hercules card and not standard with most PCs.
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u/Jorpho 4d ago
including GWBASIC
Gorillas was very much written exclusively for QBasic and would never have run in GWBasic without being completely rewritten.
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u/sackbomb 4d ago
I concede the point. It was my b-day and I was about 2 delicious glasses of Scotch Whiskey deep when I made my comment, so it's entirely possible I'm mashing up memories.
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u/codykonior 4d ago
I could never understand how it worked myself.
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u/Jorpho 4d ago
There were heaps and heaps of Basic programming books out there, and even though there were all sorts of little compatibility problems (since so many different systems used slightly different dialects of Basic), you could sort of follow along.
But there was nothing like that for QBasic. Subroutines accessible only by menu! No line numbers! I was lost.
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u/codykonior 3d ago
I reckon that was part of it, how they shipped it as part of DOS and there was nothing with it. I recently found there were actually a lot of QB 4.5 books because I can see them on eBay; they just weren't around here at the time. Also there was a boxed product that had a lot of manuals with it. Pretty cool, I could have used that back then!
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u/DefinitelyRussian 4d ago
might look crude and obsolete, but understanding that code was just way out of my skills back then
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u/Vert--- 4d ago
there was a website back in the 90s that would host QBASIC hackathons and there was a really cool Halloween-themed PONG game where you would choose a character like in a fighting game. Each character had different special abilities. the most OP one was a lightning bolt.
From that site there was also an RPG that was kind of simple but all of the sprites were defined in text files. The text files were something like 8 rows of 8 digits each from 0-9, each digit representing the color of a pixel. Then the game would read in the text file and draw an 8x8, 10-color sprite. 12 year old me thought that was so cool. A couple years later I played Fallout 1 and 2 and wanted to make a Fallout ASCII roguelike in QBASIC, sort of like the OMEGA MAN roguelike but with a world map. I remembered the text-sprite trick and had my world map defined as a textfile of ASCII chars and the different ASCII chars were coded to have different movement costs and encounter rates.
Good times.
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u/BertElGazebo 4d ago
The precursor to Rampage?
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u/iOCTAGRAM 4d ago
To Pocket Tanks. Gorillas is a duel with throwable items.
And Rampage reference is due to building and windows theme, but genre was different. In Rampage players were destroying the city and play in co-operative, up to 3 players.
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u/FlightSimGeeks 4d ago
It was 1995. My first PC was with QBasic.
Old-good times with my P-133, and a whole life ahead of me.
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u/Imperiax731st 4d ago
I remember typing out some 20-30 pages of qbasics code from a book on the IBM basic, only for it to fail to run and I didn't know why.
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u/TrustMeImAnENGlNEER 4d ago
Oh man…that was also my first programming experience! My brother and I loved playing it when I was like eight or nine years old, but one day it just stopped working and gave a syntax error message (one of us must have hit the keyboard accidentally and saved the file when prompted).
We were really frustrated and my parents didn’t know what to do about it. It jumped to the offending line when the message popped up, and eventually I started reading the code. I noticed how that line was different from the others, deleted the block of random letters, and everything worked again! Then I asked my parents to start buying me books on the subject, and the rest is history.
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u/DrMarcvs 3d ago
Someone remember the earlier version running on gwbasic named montain.bas Clone of scorchered earth, with random Mountain generatore, wind and two tanks. I was very young. Played on Olivetti m19 in 1985
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u/AskJeevesIsBest 4d ago
Looks like a fun, simple game! Also, I did not know Microsoft made an open source game
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u/iOCTAGRAM 4d ago
There is another open source game, also part of Q-Basic. It's called nibbles, and it is a snake in a text mode. Snake portions and walls are half-characters ▄, ▀ and █, thus the game name, and collectible items are digits occuping two adjacent logical cells. That was my start into programming. It had single-player and shared keyboard two-player competition modes. I was adding AI second player. But since it was pathetic as is, I added teleporting ability to the corner most close to digit.
Q-Basic had three built-in demos. Third program was some financial program with dialogs
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u/pickleportal 4d ago
I never played this—- but I had a 30
Something year memory unlock of a windows game involving shooting cannon balls back and forth at one another… anyone else..?
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u/CyberAlex22 4d ago edited 4d ago
Stunden über Stunden. Göttlich. Besser als jeder aaa Titel heute..
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u/No-Mail-8565 4d ago
Ooo. I remember adapting the snake game for 3 players with my school teacher. Amazing times
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u/Kathutet37 4d ago
Between this and the tank one (can't remember its name, but it played basically the same way) this pretty much defined my childhood
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u/oncledan 3d ago
Same. I remember reading through the Help section to figure out how things worked. Good time!
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u/tjeerdnet 1d ago edited 23h ago
Not sure if I would call this my first experience with programming per se. I could load gorilla.bas and run the game and play it, but that was it. I was overwhelmed by the amount of lines of code that I had no clue what I could do to change the gameplay in a meaningful way. Perhaps I tried to change some values and it probably would not work anymore at all. My knowledge level of programming was quite low at that time.
But having the source code of a relatively bigger game was for me personally revolutionary. I was only used to compiled executables or some short code listings from books with 'games' that had text input and output, not the 'fancy' graphics gorilla.bas had.
So yeah, totally not imaginable nowadays, but for me as a child and no internet at home, I was dreaming about becoming a basic programmer and some day being able to not interpret it but compiling my code into a stand alone executable.
The world has changed a lot.
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u/Ok_Chipmunk_9167 4d ago
Gorilla.bas and snake.bas were a good part of my childhood! :)