Unlike many of my generation who learned to program one of the 1977 Trinity (Apple II, TRS-80, and and the PET 2001), I didn’t discover BASIC Computer Games until later (1983), in my high-school library. Of course, by then, I’d been typing in BASIC programs for years, from magazines, other books, and from dot-matrix listings shared by friends. By the time I discovered BASIC Computer Games, I’d seen many of the games in other forms, as each was effectively treated in the public domain and adapted by other programmers. But it was great to see so many of these programs collected together, and I loved the book.
Fast forward to 2017. I was surprised that there was no easy way to run these games in your browser, and so I adapted Joshua Bell’s Apple II emulator to run them: Play BASIC Computer Games.
At the end of 2021, Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, launched a project of updating all these games using modern programming languages: Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era. By now, many new implementations have been collected and grouped on GitHub. For instance, WORD (the precursor to Wordle) now has implementations in ten languages. Check them out!
