Some bits of my early gamedev history (1999)

The 2000’s blurb at my http://slashie.net story mentions I “somehow” learned QBasic; well, yesterday while visiting my university I remembered a bit about how that could have happened… let me share with you a little bit of my early gamedev history!

The high school I studied in was the junior of a local university, so every year they took us two or three times to it, for sports and cultural activities. But of course, I always ended up in either the library or the computer lab.

So I think it was 1999, after some initial encounters with QBasic in school, and having played a lot of DOS games on my PC. I had to take the chance of visiting the University library to try to find a way to create videogames, and after wrangling a lot with the library’s database, I finally found a book there: it was a 1986 Spanish translation of Tim Hartnell’s “Giant Book Of Computer Games” from 1983.

Of course, it was already an old book by then, but it was a treasure for me… it contained BASIC source code listings for over 40 games! I struggled to find an interpreter that could run them but just browsing the source code, and trying to figure out what was going on, was enlightening.

But it was not just the source code listings; the book was full of insights from Tim Hartnell discussing different genres of games, and his experiences while interacting with other developers of the time. It really made me fall in love with the idea of becoming a game developer and someday being able to make part of such a community.

I also remember I grabbed the book from the library (we could get books from the University library with our high school ID!), and I was meant to return it in a couple of weeks or so… well, I could never return it, and I remember feeling super anxious that they would charge me a lot of money whenever I managed to deliver it back! I eventually did it after (over a year?) so I could enroll in the University and well, they put into consideration that I was a school student but still charged me quite a lot.

Back to 99; I believe my curiosity led me to investigate more games including the “Friendlyware” BASIC games, and then peeking into NIBBLES.BAS and GORILLA.BAS in QBasic (whose source code, as far as I remember, was pretty unfriendly for the newbie). QBasic’s online help, OTOH, was a trove of useful information and I was eventually able to create my own games through 2000, culminating in ArcherFire (the ASCII version).

Prior to the book, I think I had seen some BASIC game listings in even older magazines for computers that were never available in Colombia (like the ZX), but the book is what really put me on track.

Years afterward I would visit the library a lot, now a proper university student; I recall some of my favorite books were a collection of Object Oriented Design and Programming which again shaped my software engineering and game development history a lot.