Donkey.bas, the Accidental QBasic Classic, Turns 45
Donkey.bas was the sample game Microsoft shipped alongside QBasic in early MS-DOS releases, meant less as entertainment and more as a demonstration of what a beginner could build with the language. Despite janky ASCII-art graphics and a reputation for being almost unplayably bad, it introduced countless kids and hobbyists to programming simply because it was already sitting on their hard drive.
A new retrospective site walks through the actual source code, breaking down how the game handles input, collision detection, and screen drawing in surprisingly few lines. The project has struck a nerve on Hacker News, pulling in hundreds of upvotes and comments from developers reminiscing about their first encounters with code.
The appeal isn't nostalgia alone - the annotated source is a legible artifact of how simple, readable programs used to be the default starting point for new programmers.