Bill Gates’s shot at BASIC game development: a history lesson
It was 1981, and Bill Gates had a problem.IBM was preparing to roll out its 1981 PC, which the new company Microsoft (barely six years old) was supporting with its PC-DOS/MS-DOS operating system. These OS’s included Microsoft BASIC, which Gates felt was light years ahead of anything else out there. But how to prove it? The answer, it turned out, was a game.Gates and developer Neil Konzen locked themselves in the closet which served as their development office then and pounded out DONKEY.BAS. Although ostensibly a driving game, there was nothing similar to accelerating or braking in the controls, let alone steering. Instead, the player pressed the SPACE bar to switch lanes on a two lane road, avoiding the donkeys which randomly appeared at the top of the screen. If you avoided them, you got a point. If not, the donkeys got a point.The game was a point of ridicule for Apple developers at the time, but it did manage to show off some of the graphics and colors available with Microsoft BASIC. Unsurprisingly, no one turned to Gates for game design in the future, though.