Microsoft Founder Bill Gates Made One Of The Worst Driving Video Games Ever

I think it’s safe to say that almost everyone knows who Bill Gates is. The founder of computer software giant Microsoft was once the world’s richest man, and is currently the 13th richest in the world, which means he’s probably doing just fine. Since Gates is a tech industry billionaire, you might think the man is a tech genius and has a long history of coming up with the best ideas, all impeccably executed.

But that’s not how things work.

Remember Windows ME? Microsoft Bob? The Zune? Microsoft has a glorious history of failures and screw-ups, but that never really stopped the company from being successful. Really, it’s part of their charm. And it goes back all the way to the beginning, even back to the days when Bill Gates was still writing software code himself. My favorite example of this is a driving game called, of all things, Donkey.

This game seems to be the very first actual video game written for the then-new IBM PC platform – in this sense, it can be considered the very start of the whole, massive industry of PC gaming, which is a pretty remarkable thing when you think about it. It’s also the first driving game for the IBM PC, too, though I think even calling it a “driving” game is generous, but we’ll get into that soon.

Donkey – or, to use its actual filename, DONKEY.BAS – exists because Gates managed to secure a contract with IBM to develop both the operating system and BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language for IBM’s new entry into the nascent personal computer market, the IBM 5150, better known as the IBM PC.

The operating system Microsoft delivered to IBM was the now-famous MS-DOS; the OS was actually bought by Microsoft from a company called Seattle Computer Products and was known originally as 86-DOS, and was essentially a clone of the then-popular CP/M operating system.

Microsoft adapted it into MS-DOS 1.1, and IBM initially called it PC-DOS when they introduced the IBM PC. The BASIC IBM bought from Microsoft was a version of their existing Microsoft BASIC, which was the product that the young company was best known for, and their BASIC was already used on many early personal computers.

The reason DONKEY.BAS exists is because IBM wanted some demonstration programs for the BASIC language, especially ones that showed what could be done with graphics and sound. Bill Gates and Microsoft employee Neil Konzen worked one night until 4am to write DONKEY.BAS, and what they came up with did meet the essential goals: it was a program in BASIC that demonstrated how a real-time action game could work, and used the square-wave audio commands and various graphics commands from BASIC, including such relatively advanced ones as being able to define a rectangular area of the graphics screen to be a movable visual object, or “sprite.”

Here’s Bill Gates himself describes the creation of DONKEY.BAS:

Actually, it was myself and Neil Konzen at four in the morning with this prototype IBM PC sitting in this small room. IBM insisted that we had to have a lock on the door and we only had this closet that had a lock on it, so we had to do all our development in there and it was always over 100 degrees, but we wrote late at night a little application to show what the Basic built into the IBM PC could do. And so that was Donkey.bas. It was at the time very thrilling.

Want to see it in action, running from an original 1982 or so DOS 1.1 floppy disk on my very own IBM PCjr, one of IBM’s most infamous failures? Of course you do!

 

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Yeah, it’s not what you’d call a good game. There are some parts that I do think aren’t bad. Well, one part: I kind of like the car sprite. It reminds me of a 1960s F1 car, down to what I think are six velocity stack intakes on the rear. The titular donkey, though – that I’m less sure of. It doesn’t really look like a donkey at all. What’s going on with its face? And it’s so chonky and blocky, it feels a bit more like a cow? Kind of? [Ed note: Yes, kind of! – Pete]

Why is a ’60s F1 car driving on this seemingly rural two-lane road, anyway? And why the hell are there so many donkeys wandering around? And why does the donkey get a point when you smash into it, bisecting it and flinging its two split halves off into the surrounding countryside? How is that a victory for the donkey? It seems more like everyone loses there!

It’s not just that the game is extraordinarily simple, because it is, with only one control – hit any key to change lanes – but because it fundamentally makes no sense. How are the donkeys your adversaries here? What do they stand to gain? And after doing the basic coding, couldn’t they have at least made it so you could have at least three lanes and some directional control? As it stands, the game is more of a simple visual reflex tester than anything else.

To call DONKEY.BAS “fun” would be an exaggeration on par with calling the bits of lettuce and onion that fall out of your burger “a salad.”

The early PC’s graphics capabilities weren’t great, even for the era. This game uses the PC’s CGA graphics adapter’s high-resolution display, which, at 320×200, was on par with most of its competitors at the time. The color selection, though, was never great, with just four colors available, selectable from a two basic, terrible palettes in two intensities. DONKEY.BAS at least gave some idea of what BASIC on the PC could do, graphically, at least a bit. The version of BASIC did have decent graphics and sound commands, for what it’s worth.

I think the bigger issue goes back to just the fact that the game feels ill-considered and kind of half-assed, especially for something that was bundled with every machine to show off its capabilities. Apple bought an IBM PC to evaluate it when it came out in 1981, and Andy Hertzfeld, then working at Apple to develop the Macintosh, was part of the team that evaluated the PC, and that included trying out DONKEY.BAS. Here’s what Hertzfeld had to say about the game:

The most embarrassing game was a lo-res graphics driving game called “Donkey”. The player was supposed to be driving a car down a slowly scrolling, poorly rendered “road”, and could hit the space bar to toggle the jerky motion. Every once in a while, a brown blob would fill the screen, which was supposed to be a donkey manifesting in the middle of the road. If you didn’t hit the space bar in time, you would crash into the donkey and lose the game.

We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen. Neil was a bright teenage hacker who I knew from his work on the Apple II (who would later become Microsoft’s technical lead on the Mac project) but we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft’s co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.

Ouch. I’m not sure if it was because of reactions like this, but the second version of the DOS system disk with these demonstration programs seemed to have had Bill Gates’ programmer credit removed from the listing of DONKEY.BAS, and that appears to be the case with the version I have, too.

You can play the game yourself here and see the listing (hit the ESC key; when you get a cursor, just type LIST and hit [return]).

Now, you may be asking yourself “is Torch just being a dickhead here? Was this game really that bad, in context of the era and purpose?” and that’s a valid question to ask. You should always wonder if maybe I’m just being a dickhead. But, in this case, I don’t think so, and I say this because there’s a very good counter-example, of a game with pretty much the exact same goals – to show off a BASIC programming language and demonstrate a computer’s capabilities – that does a much better job.

That game is Little Brick Out, and it was written around 1976 or 1977 by Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple, as a way to show off what the Apple II computer could do.

Actually, in many ways, this game defined what the Apple II could do, because when Wozniak was designing the Apple II, one of his goals was that he wanted to make a machine that could play the Atari arcade game Breakout in software, as opposed to being custom-designed hardware like the arcade version. As a result, this pushed Wozniak to give the Apple II color graphics, sound, and game controllers, as well as a BASIC programming language that could access these features.

Here’s what the gameplay looked like:

This was about five years before the IBM PC, and was designed to run on a computer with less memory than the IBM PC. The resolution of the game was much lower (though the Apple II had a mode with resolution similar to the IBM), but the Apple II had many more colors. The most important distinction was that Little Brick Out could actually be fun to play, certainly more so than DONKEY.BAS.

That’s because it was, of course, a copy of a well-known game that was known to be fun. DONKEY.BAS was technically an original game, but not really, as dodge-stuff driving games were pretty well established. So, neither was all that original, but only one was actually fun.

Because of the existence of Little Brick Out, which had remarkably similar goals and intent and limitations as DONKEY.BAS but was somehow playable, I think we can comfortably say that DONKEY.BAS is garbage, perhaps one of the worst driving games ever. And Bill Gates was one of the people who programmed it.

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