minicomputer on display at the
National Museum of American History In 1971, DEC employee
David H. Ahl converted two games,
Hamurabi and
Lunar Lander, from the
FOCAL language to BASIC, partially as a demonstration of the language on the DEC
PDP-8 minicomputer. Their popularity led him to start printing BASIC games in the DEC newsletter he edited, both ones he wrote and reader submissions. In 1973, he published
101 BASIC Computer Games, containing descriptions and the
source code for video games written in BASIC. The games included were written by both Ahl and others, and included both games original to the language and
ported from other languages such as FOCAL. Many of these ports were originally mainframe computer games.
101 BASIC Computer Games was a best seller with more than 10,000 copies sold. Its second edition in 1978,
BASIC Computer Games, was the first million-selling computer book. As such, the BASIC ports of mainframe computer games included in the book were often more long-lived than their original versions or other mainframe computer games.
Hamurabi in particular is mostly known for its appearance in Ahl's book. After hearing of
The Sumerian Game, Doug Dyment at DEC created his own
The Sumer Game for fellow employee
Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language. The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king
Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues. Multiple versions of the game were created for the FOCAL and
FOCAL-69 languages, but an expanded, uncredited version of the game was included in
101 BASIC Computer Games as
Hamurabi, and later versions of the game, even in FOCAL, referenced the new title over the old.
Hamurabi influenced many later strategy and simulation games and is an antecedent to the
city-building genre. The other game Ahl originally ported to BASIC,
Lunar Lander, appeared in the book in three different forms. The original version of the game was called
Lunar, and was originally written in FOCAL for the PDP-8 by Jim Storer while a student at
Lexington High School in the fall of 1969. A different version called
Rocket was written in BASIC by Eric Peters at DEC, and a third version,
LEM, was written by William Labaree II in BASIC. Ahl converted Jim Storer's FOCAL version to BASIC, changed some of the text, and published it in his newsletter. A year or so later, all three BASIC versions of the game appeared in
101 BASIC Computer Games, under the names ROCKET (Storer version), ROCKT1 (Peters version), and ROCKT2 (Labaree version). All three text-based games required the player to control a rocket attempting to land on the Moon by entering instructions to the rocket in response to the textual summary of its current position and heading relative to the ground. Ahl and Steve North converted all three versions to
Microsoft BASIC, changed the collective name to
Lunar Lander, and published them in
Creative Computing magazine in 1976; that name was used in the 1978 edition of
BASIC Computer Games. Another game from the book is
Civil War, a text-based computer game that puts the player against the computer in a simulation of the
American Civil War. It was created in BASIC in 1968 by Larry Cram, Luther Goodie, and Doug Hibbard, students at the same high school as Storer. Ahl further credited G. Paul and R. Hess of "TIES" in St. Paul, Minnesota, for converting it into a two-player game. The game simulates fourteen major battles of the conflict, with the human player as the
South and the computer or opponent as the
North. The player can control four direct variables which interact to determine a battle's outcome: how much of their money to spend on food, salaries, and ammunition, and which of four offensive or four defensive strategies to use. The morale of the Confederate soldiers is also tracked to help determine victory in a battle. The side with the fewest casualties wins a battle, and if the player wins eight or more battles they win the game.
Civil War was later one of a number of text-based games available on early 1980s pay-to-play systems. '', running in a
Linux command terminal Possibly the most popular of the mainframe games that appeared in Ahl's book was
Star Trek. The game is a text-based computer game that puts the player in command of the
Starship Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of
Klingon warships. Unlike the other text-based games, however, it did not use written responses to player input, but instead had
character-based graphics, with different characters used as graphical symbols to represent objects. It was initially developed by Mike Mayfield in 1971 on an
SDS Sigma 7 mainframe. The game was also unlike many of the other mainframe games in the book in that it was originally written in BASIC; by the time the book was published, it had been widely copied among minicomputer and mainframe systems and modified into several versions. It was one of these, renamed by Ahl as
Space War, that appeared in
101 BASIC Computer Games. The 1978 version of the book contained a
Microsoft BASIC port of
Super Star Trek, an expanded version of the game first written in 1974, and this version was ported to numerous personal computer systems of the era; Ahl stated in the book that it was difficult to find a computer installation that did not contain a version of
Star Trek. Multiple updated versions in a wide variety of languages have been made since. By 1980,
Star Trek was described by
The Dragon magazine as "one of the most popular (if not
the most popular) computer games around", with "literally scores of different versions of this game floating around". ==Other games==