DONKEY.BAS

The game was written by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and early employee Neil Konzen.

All BASIC programs used the ".BAS" extension, and MS-DOS-compatible operating systems that came before Windows 95 display file names in upper case.

DONKEY.BAS is a simple driving game in which the player controls a car but cannot steer, accelerate or brake, only changing lanes to avoid a series of donkeys on the road.

The game displays the number of points earned by the player and donkey, but does not end or change when a particular score is reached.

The game continues to generate interest, in part because of the involvement of Gates at a time when Microsoft was relatively small and only six years old.

According to a speech delivered by Gates in 2001:[1] Actually, it was myself and Neil Thompson [sic] at four in the morning with this prototype IBM PC sitting in this small room.

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.

We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen.

The operating systems with which the game was first distributed still work on modern computers with compatible BIOS and 5.25-inch floppy drives; however, IBM BASICA which ran the program under PC DOS 1.x requires ROM-based IBM Cassette BASIC, which modern computers do not have.

The game demonstrates to programmers how a Visual Basic .NET application can be structured and how to use various features of the .NET platform.