This is the eighth in a series of mini-articles on the early history of video games. The game featured here will not [Ad. one does] receive a review score, and thus will not appear on the Tier List.
I'm going out of order ever so slightly with this post to cover the next set of BASIC games. While I'd like to cover Frogmaster as it is on my master list, there simply isn't enough info on it out there to warrant coverage at the present time. Therefore I'll be skipping over it until and if a time comes where more information on the original version of Frogmaster comes to light.
The early BASIC programmers continued with the theme of sports for a couple more years before expanding out into more adventurous territory in the late 60s and early 70s.
Bingo (1966)
Here's where I'd normally put a picture of the game...
Release Date: January 23rd, 1966
Platform: PDP-10
Genre: Simulation
Developer(s): Larry Bethurum
Publisher(s): DECUS
Although I'm not entirely sure if it's right to call Bingo a sport. MobyGames lists its genre as "gambling," but I'm not sure if that's correct either. Regardless, this one is going to be rather brief, as I can't play it, and there's two reasons for that:
- While the source code is available, it was never converted into a more updated form of BASIC to run on home PCs in the 1978 version of Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games. It was culled from the first version. Believe me, I spent an entire afternoon trying to get it to work until I realised that this was one of the reasons why it won't work on something like Vintage BASIC.
- It requires a printer to print out physical bingo cards. This is probably the reason it wasn't updated.
Seeing as I don't read BASIC (and even if I did, this is a primitive form of it), I can't say how the game knows when you score a Bingo unless it's manually input somehow, or the program remembers the cards it generated and keeps track of what numbers have been called. If any readers know their BASIC, perhaps share how it works in the comments and I'll add it in here as an addendum.
Not much else to say on this one. It's at least more involved than the 1965 BASIC programs, so there's some advancement in programming prowess developing, as is to be expected. It would be nice to be able to try it out, even in a more simulated format if one day someone is mad enough to make a playable rendition of it. I doubt I'd give it a rating, anyway, since it's purely a game of luck with no player agency.
PDP 10 Timesharing Basketball (1967)
Release Date: May, 1967
Platform: PDP-10
Genre: Sports
Developer(s): Charles Bacheller
Publisher(s): DECUS
[Ed. The above video was added later, and thus does not line up with the playthrough below, which was my first playthrough.]
Now, here's a game I can play! Moving along to 1967, we have this basketball game, taking on the same lengthy naming convention as John Kemeny's baseball game of 1965. In turn, I'll be taking on my naming convention from when I covered that game for this one, and will refer to PDP 10 Timesharing Basketball as PDP Basketball to make things easier for everyone. The internal source code also refers to the game as Digital College Basketball just to make things more confusing.
PDP Basketball was written by Charles Bacheller, originally in May 1967. According to the source code, he revised the game on the 4th of April, 1968. What the revision changed or added cannot be ascertained, as it seems that original version is lost. We know Bacheller programmed the game at Dartmouth College thanks to 101 BASIC Computer Games, but there is no information on him otherwise, and this is his sole credit according to MobyGames.
As I just mentioned, PDP Basketball was included in David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games, simply titled Basketball there, with very minor tweaks to the code when compared with the source code. All the games from the 1978 microcomputer edition of the book are available to download from vintage-basic.net, should you be interested in trying any of them out yourself. This is where I got the games from, and will be playing them with the Vintage BASIC software from now on. I wasn't aware of any of this when I did the previous post on the first BASIC games, hence why I used the Internet Archive version of Digital Championship Football there. Vintage BASIC will be my preferred method from now on for these games.
Upon starting the game, you receive the instructions: you are captain and playmaker for Dartmouth. The game explains what shot and defense options you have available, inputted with integers. Curiously, the game also uses decimals, 6.5 to set a man-to-man defense, and 7.5 for no defense. 5, 8 and 9 then go unused. Strange choice. You can also type a 0 to change your defense setup at any time.
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| "Allignment" is spelled incorrectly. |
It took me a few seconds of reading the instructions to actually figure out the presence of the decimals. The formatting is a little cumbersome, hence my accidentally pressing 5 when it's not used.
Now, I confess that I have no earthly idea how basketball works as a sport, mostly because I have no interest in it whatsoever. So most of the terms the game uses for shots and defense mean nothing to me (except Lay Up, I know what that is.) I figure man-to-man defense is a good way to go starting out, so I set that as my defense and start making efforts to score.
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| My goal shooters are quite lousy. |
It does not start off well. First shot is fouled, and every other attempt to score fails. My opponents get two opportunities, and score both times. Time to change things up a little. I set a press defense. We have immediate success, preventing the opposition from scoring twice, steal the ball and score an easy lay up. My opponents immediately get one back, however. We go back and forth for a little while, until the opposition is fouled, but we only get one of the penalty shots in, and they score immediately after that. Now 3 points behind.
I then decide to change to zone defense, to see if that improves our performance. Things only end up getting worse, and the deficit increases to 8 points by the time I decided that it isn't working and change back to man-to-man defense. My team continues to fumble and bumble around the court until the half-time siren rings out. We are now 11 points behind, and I don't expect things to get much better in the second half for us.
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| A poor first half. |
I change back to zone defense for the start of the second half, since it seemed to be most effective in the first. We proceed to get utterly smashed, and the deficit quickly blows out to 21 points. Back to press defense. Proceedings turn into what is effectively a point-for-point affair until the game ends, with the final score as a 33 - 53 loss for Dartmouth.
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| Full time. A comprehensive drubbing if I ever saw one. |
That was a very poor performance. Must be what it feels like to be a North Melbourne or West Coast supporter in 2024. I was very dissatisfied with that game, and decided to play another round. I only produced a marginally better result, going down 24 - 43, a mere 1 point improvement. I'll be getting the sack by the end of the season if I keep producing these sorts of performances. Here I also discovered that, due to my accidental button press, that I skipped the part of the code where I name my opponents.
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| It was a 1 point improvement on last match, at least... |
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| VICTORY! |
And Dartmouth has done it! A 58 - 48 win! For this, my strategy was to set no defense and to predominantly go for lay ups, with set shots for whenever a lay up rebounded to us. Things were tight at half time, with a 27 - 24 lead to us, but we pulled away quickly in the second half. I find it interesting that I immediately found success going for a hyper-aggressive strategy, ignoring defense entirely. It seems best to ignore the jump shot options entirely, especially the long shot, that rarely seems to work.
Baseball (1967)
No picture again...
Release Date: August, 1967
Platform: PDP-10
Genre: Sports
Developer(s): Jacob Bergmann
Publisher(s): DECUS
As is the case with Bingo, the source code for Baseball is available freely online, but it was never updated for the 1978 version of BASIC Computer Games, and is therefore unplayable without someone coming along and updating the code.
Baseball sees you taking part in a match between the Red Sox and Cardinals, played in St. Louis, according to the game code. It also includes the names of players in each team, which is an appreciable amount of detail for such a primitive game.
Speaking of detail, this is a far more complex game as compared to John Kemeny's rendition of baseball, PDP-10 Timesharing World Series, from 2 years prior. Where the only player input that game had was inputting the seed for the game, only for the match itself to play out automatically, Bergmann's Baseball involves more player agency. Said agency merely amounts to answering a series of questions mostly with either "YES" or "NO", or a number for questions relating to the bases. You at least have an influence on the entire course of the match here, so one could argue that this is a proper game. All actions have probabilities associated with them, and the player can request these by typing "PR".
It seems rather odd to me that Baseball never featured in any version of BASIC Computer Games. There are baseball games in the first edition, but none of them resemble Bergmann's program. The writeup for the baseball games in the first edition mention that other programs were submitted but were not included, but all have authors listed, none of which are Bergmann. I suspect this means that this game was not known to Ahl at the time, or he passed over it without mentioning it in the book. A bit of a shame, as the source code is just sitting around and could be converted to run on DOSBox or Vintage BASIC quite easily (I assume it would be easy?)
Don't expect the flow of BASIC games to slow down anytime soon. We're just getting started with these games.
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