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I'm looking for some old text based games written in basic. Anyone remember books that came out with the code printed out in them! That was an era! Preferably some classic ones. I'd like to take a text game written in basic game that has at some point been treated as a neat game and use it for my purposes.

Why not a c++ console one?

Probably because I wont understand the code thoroughly and partly for nostalgia of reading basic code!

I'm surprised there isn't a repository of them around!

I can't think of any off hand, but have you tried focusing-in on some of the popular BASIC platforms of that era? I would say it largely stretched from the Apple II era to probably QBASIC early in the PC era. In between you would have had the Commodore 64, which was likely a popular target of many of the old "type the code" games.

oh man I wrote so many in Qbasic. Mine and so many others first language.

I remember back in college (1981-82ish) some computer magazine (it might have been Byte) posted the source code to a Scott Adams pirate adventure game - it was in some flavor of Basic if I recall.

I spent a long time trying to get that working, only to find out my Atari 800's version of Basic didn't support some of the commands.

Yeah, in retrospect it was a pretty terrible idea to distribute games as source code to people who weren't programmers and during a time of such massive platform fragmentation. Some of them were definitely fun, and I guess the period of being patient enough to type it all in just made you more excited, but I am sure many people did just that: typed it all in only to get an error that you had no idea how to fix (and in many cases, like yours, you couldn't, at least not easily).

You make sense, Jack. But it gets in the way of the nosalgia feels!

Feeeeeeels!

I was just remembering some of the games - like running a castle siege or growing 'bushels'. Or 'Camel', the game...

I mean people played these - so I think they are proof of being a valid game (despire the era moving on)

I get tired of both trying to invent a new game and also keep adding to it to justify it as a game.

Sorry haha!

And I guess they also worked at the time since all games were painting graphics with code and writing any music or sound effects as code as well. Stuff like that actually made me wonder the other day when graphics became exterior to the game code. I know music was largely composed in the game code until CDs arrived, but I have no idea about graphics. For example, were Mario and Link on the NES created in a simple paint program, or just coded into their respective games? I have wondered that for some unknown reason.

same here. Always wondered about that. About how many coders it took, what the code looks like, did the coders of Zelda realize how epic it would be, ect.

I honestly miss those days. I have seen some great Zelda remakes/followups but nothing like the original still to this day.