What's What! Video Game Facts (86/100)

It's hard to believe now, but like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates started in his journey working under contract for another company in this case the giant IBM, after the companie hired Microsoft to develop an operating system and a version of the BASIC programming language to launch with its new IBM PC Gates decides to demonstrate the IBM PC new programming language's capability creating a PC games to show a interactive program with color graphics and sound.

Donkey or DONKEY.BAS as it is known today because the ".BAS" extension for be created using a version of the BASIC programming language, is a fair simple games to show it, the driving game in which the player controls a car but can't drive, accelerate or brake, only changing lanes to avoid a series of donkeys on the road, so is about a car that has to avoid donkeys in the road. The first version of DONKEY.BAS was launched in 1981, for later release a version 1.10 in 1982.

Bill Gates himself told the history of the game during a TechEd keynote in 2001. Here’s what he had to say:

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.

Microsoft created a game named DONKEY.NET in 2001 using Visual Basic.NET language. It was a three-dimensional game that aimed to hit donkeys, if it was programmed by Gates in person, well the truth is I don't know, but it would have been great if it was like that.