QBasic was the first programming language I ever wrote anything in. I mostly just transcribed stuff from books I got at the library, but I did try to write my own games. I definitely messed with gorillas.bas.
Big nostalgia hit here.
Big nostalgia hit here.
One year I sent a “Happy Christmas” message to all stores on our internal Lotus Notes email system with a hyperlink in the email.
The link would, when clicked, load GORILLA.BAS into Qbasic and run it. The idea was, in my teenage mind, a little Easter Egg to cheer people up around the festive season. Unreal to think that you could just link and run an executable from an email back then!
An hour later I get a frantic call from group IT - I’d forgotten there’s no “exit” button - we now had 100s of stores where all the computers were playing Gorilla, and nobody knew the keyboard shortcut to quit the game.
I think the IT guys had to call every single store that day and tell them how to get out of Gorilla. For whatever reason, I wasn’t fired.
One day when he was out, I messed with the qbasic source and made his gravity concept be a random number. My coworker's winning streak ended as did his constant nagging to get people to play!