BASIC Computer Games was the book that put a hundred programs into the hands of anyone with a computer that spoke BASIC. David Ahl edited it, Steve North converted every program to Microsoft BASIC, and George Beker drew a cartoon for each game. Its Microcomputer Edition came out in October 1978, just as home computers were arriving, but most of its games were older than that: they had been written over the previous ten years on timesharing systems in schools, colleges and companies, and first collected in a book in 1973.
From DEC to Creative Computing
The story starts at Digital Equipment Corporation, where Ahl worked at the beginning of the 1970s. In an advertisement in Creative Computing in January 1981, he told it himself: DEC wanted “a painless way to show reluctant educators that computers weren’t scary or difficult to use”, and games and simulations seemed a good method. He asked DEC’s customers to send in their best games, and the response was overwhelming: “I got 21 versions of blackjack, 15 of nim and 12 of battleship.” He chose the best 90, added 11 of his own, and DEC published the result as 101 BASIC Computer Games in 1973.
The programs in that book were printed in six different dialects of BASIC, as written for machines such as DEC’s timesharing systems, the HP 2000 and the CDC 3600. Ahl later saluted the readers who had worked through its “nearly illegible listings” with a magnifying glass. When he left DEC in 1974, he asked for the rights to print the book himself, and DEC agreed as long as the name was changed. His new magazine, Creative Computing, sold the book by mail order. In October 1976 its advertisements in BYTE called 101 BASIC Computer Games “the most popular book of computer games in the world”, with over 30,000 copies sold.
The Microcomputer Edition
The market had changed. “In 1977,” the book explains, “it appeared that Microsoft Basic was fast becoming the standard Basic for microcomputers.” Steve North rewrote all the programs in Microsoft BASIC; games that could not be converted, or were not worth it, were dropped and replaced. Ahl’s acknowledgements thanked North for “a truly herculean task”, and thanked Teletype Corporation for lending the Model 43 printer used for the listings, which were reduced to 64% of their size. The book opens with a warning about its own limits: every program ran “without error, in Microsoft Basic Version 3.0 or higher”, but other BASICs might need converting, and a beginner should not “attempt to enter the longest program first. This will only result in frustration and confusion.”
The Microcomputer Edition was copyrighted by Creative Computing, which sold it by mail order, and it reached bookshops in a trade edition from Workman Publishing in New York, priced on the back cover at $7.95. A TRS-80 edition followed, advertising 102 games for Radio Shack’s computer. The back cover promised “101 imaginative and challenging games for one, two, or more players”. The count includes alternative versions: there are two Footballs and two Tic Tac Toes, and Lunar, LEM and Rocket are three versions of the same landing simulation.
What was in it
Each game had a page or two of description, a listing and a sample run, and the descriptions say where the games came from:
- Hammurabi: govern ancient Sumeria for ten years, buying land, feeding your people and planting grain while plague and rats strike. It was “originally written in Focal at DEC; author unknown”, and Ahl converted it to BASIC.
- Lunar, LEM and Rocket: land on the Moon by setting the burn rate of the retro rockets every ten seconds. Lunar was first written in FOCAL by Jim Storer, a student at Lexington High School.
- Super Star Trek: a larger version, by Robert Leedom and David Ahl, of the Star Trek game first written by Mike Mayfield.
- Animal: a guessing game that starts knowing only “fish” and “bird” and learns a new animal, and a question to tell it apart, every time it loses.
- Hangman, Blackjack, Basketball, Civil War, Stock Market and a few dozen more, sorted in the index into categories from “Introductory Fun” to “Matrix Manipulation”.
The book’s introduction set the games in their history, from A. L. Samuel’s checkers program for the IBM 701 in 1952 to Spacewar!. “What happens to a fanatical cult,” Ahl asked, “when you open the temple doors and let everyone take its source into their own homes?”
Sequels and sales
The readers kept sending games. In 1979 Creative Computing revised and corrected BASIC Computer Games and published a companion volume, More BASIC Computer Games, with 84 new games, including Camel, Eliza and two versions of Hunt the Wumpus. More BASIC Computer Games was also sold in a TRS-80 edition. Ahl’s January 1981 advertisement said that the first book was in its fifth printing and that “combined sales are over one half million copies”, which made them, he wrote, “the best selling pair of books in recreational computing by a wide margin”. Later accounts, including the modern project to port the games, describe BASIC Computer Games as the first computer book to sell a million copies. The period sources quoted here give the half-million figure for both books together, and do not confirm the million.
Ahl went on to write BASIC Computer Adventures, published by Microsoft Press in 1986. The games themselves never quite went away. A project on GitHub run under the Coding Horror name set out to port all of them to ten modern languages, including Python, JavaScript, C# and Rust, “for 2022 and beyond”.
Sources
- David H. Ahl (ed.), BASIC Computer Games: Microcomputer Edition (Creative Computing / Workman Publishing, first printing October 1978; fourteenth printing consulted): title and copyright pages; “The Author”; acknowledgements; contents; introduction (dated September 1978); “The Basic Language”; the descriptions of Animal, Hammurabi, Lunar, LEM, Rocket and Super Star Trek; index by game category; back cover ($7.95).
- Creative Computing, January 1981 (also February 1981): advertisement “Basic Computer Games” by David H. Ahl, telling the book’s history from 1971 and giving sales and prices.
- BYTE issue 14, October 1976: Creative Computing advertisements for 101 BASIC Computer Games (“the most popular book of computer games in the world”; “Over 30,000 copies sold”; 248 pages).
- Stephen B. Gray, review of More Basic Computer Games, Creative Computing, April 1980: Creative Computing Press, 1979, 84 games.
- Electronic Games, October 1982: Creative Computing advertisement for both books and the TRS-80 edition of More Basic Computer Games.
- David H. Ahl, More BASIC Computer Games (TRS-80 edition): contents (Wumpus 1 and Wumpus 2).
- David H. Ahl (ed.), BASIC Computer Games: TRS-80 Edition (Workman Publishing): cover (“102 programmable games designed for use with the Radio Shack TRS-80”).
- David H. Ahl, David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Adventures (Microsoft Press, 1986): title and copyright pages.
- “BASIC Computer Games” project, coding-horror, GitHub (web): the ports and their languages. https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games