Originally published by DEC in 1973 as 101 BASIC Computer Games, the book was so popular that it had two more printing runs, the last in March 1975.

With the release of the first microcomputers, and Microsoft BASIC soon after, the collection added several new games, removed some, and those that remained from the original were ported to this dialect.

[1] Around 1971, Ahl ported two popular early mainframe games from DEC's FOCAL language to BASIC: Hamurabi and Lunar Lander.

Their popularity was such that he called for more submissions for future editions of the newsletter, and quickly gathered many, with a considerable group of them coming from high school students.

The release of the "1977 Trinity" machines (Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80) was soon followed by a great many new competing microcomputer platforms featuring BASIC, along with the userbase to go with them, and demand for the book led to a second edition in 1978.

Program listings from the second ("microcomputer") edition, and from More Basic Computer Games, can be run by the open-source Brassica interpreter in R or Python.