Prehistory VIII: More BASIC Sports

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:

1. 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.
2. It requires a printer to print out physical bingo cards. This is probably the reason it wasn't updated.

I suspect it wouldn't be too difficult to update the code and produce a browser program with a simulated printer, but I have neither coding skills, nor the time to learn them to undertake the task. This brief description of the game will have to do for now.

We know who wrote this program, and when and where he programmed it thanks to the source code providing those details. Larry Bethurum produced Bingo at Phillips Exeter Academy. It produced some very noteworthy individuals, of which Bethurum is not one, as far as I'm aware. Whether he was an educator or student is effectively impossible to determine without some serious investigation, which I don't believe is worth undertaking for a game I can't even play.

In basic terms, Bingo is a computerised version of that familiar game of luck we all know (I assume it's the American version being used here, not the British one.) Though this is essentially a one-on-one version played against the computer. The program would print out a bingo card for the player and itself. The program instructs the player to play both cards, while also giving you some lip, warning you against cheating by saying, 

"Don't get smart. I'll be playing both your card and mine up here in Dartmouth (so, there.)" 

The nerve of it. What's Dartmouth got to do with this, anyway?

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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. 

It was a 1 point improvement on last match, at least...

I can't say with certainty how the game determines the outcomes of my choices. MobyGames suggests that it's "mostly random chance." It seems, from these two games, to be biased against the player, but I'm not sure if I'm doing something to influence that or just getting unlucky. Making the same play over and over does produce different results, suggesting that it is mostly random.

I tried a third match, experimenting with the "none" defense option, and that went much better than the previous matches. We actually led for a decent amount of time, and almost mounted a sizeable comeback in the second half, only losing 49 - 54. Makes me wonder if no defense is the best option for securing a win...

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.

Well, I can note this down as the first game on my list that is, by my determination, beatable. I will still refrain from giving scores out at this stage, as I'm not sure such a primitive game works with my rating system all that well. The general randomness of the game doesn't help in that regard, either. I was tempted to give it a score, but seeing as it would receive N/A in most categories, I don't see the point. These enterprising programmers are making big strides towards it, though...

[Ad. I decided overnight that PDP Basketball was worthy of a review score, so that post can be read here.]

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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Prehistory VII: Sports, Sports, Sports (And a New, "Basic" Programming Language)

This is the seventh in a series of mini-articles on the early history of video games. The game featured here will not receive a review score, and thus will not appear on the Tier List.

I was uncertain at first of the relevance / significance of these two games at first. However, upon looking into them more deeply, I've discovered that they, along with their author, are actually of incredible significance to the development of gaming, especially in the realm of early PC gaming. So, let's see why.

The PDP-10 Timesharing World Series (1965)

Release Date: January 13th, 1965

Platform: PDP-10

Genre: Sports Simulation

Developer(s): John G. Kemeny (later revised by Keith Bellairs)

Publisher(s): DECUS

First off: yes, that name is indeed a mouthful. For the length of this post (and for the sake of brevity), I'll be referring to it as PDP World Series. Both of these games have the same author, so I'll briefly discuss him here also.

Both games are authored by John G. Kemeny, a Hungarian-American scientist (fun fact: he worked for Albert Einstein at one time.) Quite a brilliant man who contributed massively in the area of computer science, among other things. His accomplishment most relevant to our discussion today, and to gaming as a whole, is the invention of (alongside Thomas Kurtz) the "Beginners' All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code," or, as you may know it: BASIC, the programming language that would become the lingua franca for most first and second generation home computers. Most computer games we'll see on the blog over the 70s and 80s would have been written in BASIC. A form of it - Visual Basic - is even still in use today.

Naturally, Kemeny (and others) had to show what his new language could do, so writing some programs was in order. For some reason sports were on the brain of the early BASIC programmers, Kemeny included, and thus many of the first BASIC programs were sports simulations. The first of these, written by Kemeny himself, was PDP World Series, a baseball simulation game (later revised by Keith Bellairs, and then again by Kemeny). Fortunately for us, the source code has recently been discovered and graciously converted to run on DOS by a fellow by the name of "Benedict" over at MyAbandonWare.com, meaning it's fully playable today!

*Insert funny baseball music here*

Well, when I say "playable," it's honestly not really a game at all. It's not a simulation game in the sense we think of simulation games that attempt to fully simulate a sport in every facet. This is just a text-based simulation of a game of baseball (Dodgers vs. Yankees) based on RNG. The match automatically plays with the only input from the player being to select a number as a seed at the beginning. You then simply watch how the game unfolds. For this first game I chose the number 123. Dodgers are on the left column, Yankees on the right.

Mmm, bit of a dull one so far...

I will give a word of warning here - you will need to fiddle with the DOSBox settings, otherwise the game will fly by without you being able to read anything being printed on screen beside the final result. You'll need to change the "cycles=fixed" setting in the DOSBox config to 250 or lower to get the game to run at a legible speed.

The Yankees secure a come-from-behind victory!

The game runs a 9-inning game, and declares the final score. 123 was a lower scoring but tight affair. I tried another game with 234, and that resulted in a 10-3 win for the Dodgers. It's mildly amusing as one of the text files that comes with the download has a line stating "For an exciting game, type in 234." Your wish is my command.

In reality, while it's significant for being one of - if not the first - BASIC program, it's not really a game. And I still prefer cricket.

Digital (Dartmouth) Championship Football [FTBALL] (1965)

Release Date: Late 1965

Platform: GE-325, PDP-10

Genre: Sports Simulation

Developer(s): John G. Kemeny

Publisher(s): DECUS

Now we've got our American bases covered! (I could go on a small rant about our superior Aussie football codes, but for the readers' sake I will refrain.) Kemeny wrote an American football game in the latter half of 1965 to complement the baseball game from January. Upon initial inspection, and according to MobyGames, the main version of the game available now is a port to the Wang 2200 system from 1974. I can certainly say that it's not the original program, as it has had some additions. This one is where we get the name Digital Championship Football from, it seems, as Kemeny's program was assigned the title FTBALL. It also features some additional ASCII graphics and animation that most definitely would not have been in the original.

Fortunately, there is another version of the game floating around on the Internet Archive that certainly seems more akin to the original. This one was included in David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book in 1978, and is credited to John Kemeny, suggesting that it is the original (though this particular 1978 reproduction is credited to Raymond Miseyka of Butler, Pennsylvania.) It titles the game FTBALL also. This version is playable on the Archive, which is fantastic, as I originally thought this game lost when doing up my master list. Always a pleasant surprise to find such things. 

[Ed. I'm going through all these old posts and adding videos to them. The video for FTBALL is played through Vintage BASIC, whereas all the screenshots are from the Internet Archive version. There are no gameplay differences, they just look different.]

[Ed. ed. I incorrectly attributed this game to Miseyka. It is, in fact, Kemeny's original. I cover this mistake in an addendum article, in which I also score Dartmouth Championship Football, as I'm now calling it.]

I'm confident I know what I want, but thanks anyway.

Upon loading the game, it gives you an option to play either a "modern" or "classic" version of the game. Obviously I'm interested in playing the original in this instance, so classic will do nicely for me. Maybe when I come back around to this when I cover 1978 I'll have a look at the modern version.

After selecting classic, it jumps straight into the game in all its text-based glory. Curiously, the game calls itself Dartmouth Championship Football. Perhaps that's the real title for the original? Dartmouth College is where Kemeny and Kurtz invented BASIC, and Kemeny would go on to become president of the college. More evidence suggesting this is the original 1965 game.

Anyway, the game gives you the instructions, explaining to you that you are the quarterback for Dartmouth, and asks you to name the opposing team. I opt to face off against the 49ers.

I watched a superbowl once, so I know a football team.

Right, let's see how this goes...

Ah... that's not a good start.

The 49ers immediately score a touchdown. Great. Now it comes to my turn. I'm glad to say that this is actually a game, with actual player agency, which was completely absent in PDP World Series. Although, the results of each action are determined at random, so your choices don't really affect the outcomes.

I tried many different plays, but failed to score a touchdown or a single point. The 49ers manage to immediately score another touchdown. Clearly my team is utterly incompetent.

Strange deja vu...

Time to go around again.

Time to look for a new coach, methinks.

We end up being penalised offside, effectively ending the match with us going down 0 - 14. Quite a disappointing start. Credit to the boys, they fought hard, but the 49ers were the better team on the day. And whatever other cliché stuff that needs to be said. Aussie Rules is still better.

I must admit, I found myself actually enjoying that a little. Even though it gives the illusion of player influence, with events being determined at random, it's still mildly enjoyable seeing how things play out. While I'm tempted to break my rules and give this a score, since it is technically the original and an actual game, I don't think the games of this era are substantial enough for me to start throwing scores out just yet. This would get N/As in most of my categories.

These two games really mark the beginning of the computer gaming scene proper, as far as I'm concerned. More folks from Dartmouth produced other sports-themed games in the late 60s (including a bingo game), and BASIC would spread like wildfire after that.

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