Commercial Games written in BASIC? Yes, lots!

[mrcook]

Over the weekend I somehow came across the Best BASIC game? forum post, which I thought was a good question, but it seems not so easy to find a complete list of games written in BASIC. Someone posted a link to the Sinclair BASIC listing, but on looking through that it's mostly just magazine type-ins or board games.

So I got 'a thinking...and then 'a tinkering...then I threw together a little something to parse speccy tape files, extract the BASIC listing, and make some simple (stupid) decision on whether the BASIC code was just a loader, or an actual game. I only have a few tape images myself so I went off to the Internet Archive and found the TOSEC collection: zx-spectrum-tosec-set-v-2020-02-18-lady-eklipse, and proceeded to download the Games.zip and Applications.zip.

Now, my little tool can only process .TAP and .TZX files, and even then it struggled with a bunch, so I only processed something like 50% of that collection, so yeah, not very complete. I also haven't combined the Side A/B entries, and other such things (although I have made rough calculation). Also, there are for sure a bunch of false-positives, but hey, it was fun ride, and maybe some of you here will find it useful.

And here, as they say, are the results:

GAMES (61615 files):

• ~800 games (1297 tapes) containing 400+ lines of BASIC
• ~800 games (1157 tapes) containing 200-399 lines of BASIC
• ~1000 games (1487 tapes) containing 100-199 lines of BASIC

APPLICATIONS (9970 files):

• ~250 applications (346 tapes) containing 400+ lines of BASIC
• ~300 applications (487 tapes) containing 200-399 lines of BASIC
• ~400 applications (577 tapes) containing 100-199 lines of BASIC

And here are the lists:

• Games: https://mrcook.uk/speccy/games-with-basic.txt
• Applications: https://mrcook.uk/speccy/applications-with-basic.txt

These include such classics as, Stock Market, Nat West Trophy, Bullseye, and Bingo.
Maybe these are slightly better, Journey's End, Alcatraz Harry, Quest for the Holy Grail, Blake's Seven, Football Manager. <shrug>

[PeteProdge]

If "Name a ZX Spectrum game" came up on Family Fortunes, you could expect the usual clichés of Jet Set Willy, Chuckie Egg, Atic Atac and I think it's very fair to say Football Manager. As we know, that's a BASIC game and it's commercial. VEEERY much commercial, probably one of the biggest selling ZX Spectrum games of all time.

[WhatHoSnorkers]

The General was very good (apart from a bug that I fixed). There is a small piece of machine code for a sound-effect and to stop you pressing BREAK, but that's about it. I was surprised to find it was BASIC after it crashed...

[bluespikey]

The General was very good (apart from a bug that I fixed). There is a small piece of machine code for a sound-effect and to stop you pressing BREAK, but that's about it. I was surprised to find it was BASIC after it crashed...

The General from 1989, for which was charged 12.99?!? Lawks, that's all kinds of records. By far the last basic release, the most expensive basic release. I would have bought it like all CCS games but stopped when the price went too high.

[PeteProdge]

the most expensive basic release

I'm not 100% certain, but I think those massively expensive 'Pools Predictor' programs advertised in Sinclair User's classified sections that promised to "BEAT THE BOOKIE!" were written in BASIC. Definitely the most expensive software I saw back in the day and by the quality of the ad, it just always felt BASIC was what it was written in! Pure prejudice on my part.

[WhatHoSnorkers]

I think I got the General from the Home Computer Club, so a little cheaper. It's an interesting game, and at least you can't just break in to it... effort there. Some stuff put at ERRSP I think.

[TMD2003]

Are we counting games written in BASIC and then compiled? If so, I've played a fair few of them.

Mined-Out was always one that was cited as being brilliant despite being written in BASIC.

[mrcook]

Are we counting games written in BASIC and then compiled? If so, I've played a fair few of them.

My reason for doing this was to see what games actually have BASIC you can extract and read without needing to disassemble machine code.

Naturally I haven't looked at every game I listed but some seem to have a lot of BASIC as some kind of fancy loader, others might be mostly BASIC but with some machine code data/gfx/sound, and those I would count, as the game logic itself is written in BASIC.

[uglifruit]

Are we counting games written in BASIC and then compiled? If so, I've played a fair few of them.

Mined-Out was always one that was cited as being brilliant despite being written in BASIC.

Mined Out is great.

I'm not really sure whether I'd consider compiled games as "in basic". I mean, of course they *were* but the sophistication of the compiler, and concessions - and additional features - of the compiler kind of stop feeling like they've been written in BASIC. Is Frank'n'stein a BASIC game?

Similarly, what about things like Laser BASIC, Mega BASIC or Beta BASIC ... Adding things like sprites, windows as well as different structure commands suche as REPEAT UNTIL. At some point, you're no longer really thinking in ZX spectrum basic, you're thinking in the commands available to you ... At its absurd conclusion you could think of ADG or similar as the pinnacle of this.

Similarly, a BASIC program that pokes some stuff into memory, and runs a short machine code routine to make sound effects ... Probably most people would think of that as in BASIC. But there might be purists for whom even ROM calls to scroll the screen might be considered. "not pures basic".

It's a grey area

[zxbruno]

Related to this topic, but I'm tired and can't think of specific game names nor authors:

-Someone has been making BASIC "micro" versions of known games. I think the most recent ones were inspired by Fred and Abu Simbel Profanation
-A couple games were released in the past year, or maybe two years ago, that left everyone speechless when they learned they were made with 100% Sinclair BASIC
-The Bytemaniacos competition gave us great BASIC games in the past 10 years or so

[spider]

Without reading the list or going to look:

Urban Upstart
The Wild Bunch

The former does iirc use a little bit of code to draw the room pictures or stores them in the code, I'd have to check. The latter might have some code routines being called but it is essentially written in good old ZX Basic.

FrankNStein was Basic but compiled so that does not really count, quite a few games like this although few are decent.

[Turtle_Quality]

Two other non-action games I enjoyed in pure basic were Dictator and Software Star.

There's a separate thread here of compiled basic games

viewtopic.php?t=5708&start=10

Occasionally action games could be pretty good in compiled Basic. On the other hand if you bought an action game written and running in normal Basic you'd probably want your money back.

There was also a number of games (some otherwise quite advanced games) that dropped back to basic to show the high score table or start game options, or to use INPUT for you to enter the difficulty level - Ant Attack and Zombie Zombie for instance. I vaguely remember entering USR (some rom address) at this input to get Zombie Zombie to return to basic so I could save a copy to Microdrive.

Escape in 3D was quite unusual in that it was an okay action game where you could press break during the action and return to basic, all of the animation was in machine code but part of the main game loop was in basic.

[Morkin]

GAMES (61615 files):

• ~800 games (1297 tapes) containing 400+ lines of BASIC
• ~800 games (1157 tapes) containing 200-399 lines of BASIC
• ~1000 games (1487 tapes) containing 100-199 lines of BASIC

This seems a surprisingly low number to me, from my experience every other game in the archive seems to be a BASIC type in of Yahtzee, or Pontoon or something...

[Vampyre]

I'm probably wrong here, but I'm sure I read that The Oracle's Cave was written mostly in BASIC with some M/C routines for the scrolling.

[Morkin]

I'm probably wrong here, but I'm sure I read that The Oracle's Cave was written mostly in BASIC with some M/C routines for the scrolling.

You're correct, if you hit BREAK when it's loaded you can see it all.

It goes to show that if you decide on the right M/C routines to use for your game (rather than just sound effects for example), you can combine it with BASIC quite nicely.

[Tan Coul]

I've often wondered what the shortest BASIC game sold commercially was - I remember in the 80s being amazed (well not in context of its awful gameplay, just at the sheer chutzpah of charging £5.50 for it) that MC Lothlorien's Samurai Warrior was about less than 9 screens of BASIC, most of which was instructions, but was anything still more egregious ever sold for actual folding stuff by a (hem hem) reputable firm?

[mrcook]

I've updated my script to include the number of lines of BASIC found on the tape. I've also de-duped the collection a little: no TZX/TAP of the same name, and filenames containing "[a]" are only included once. The line count and filename are separated by a TAB character, so load the file into a spreadsheet if you wish to sort alphabetically.

• Games: https://mrcook.uk/speccy/games-with-basic.txt
• Applications: https://mrcook.uk/speccy/applications-with-basic.txt

[mrcook]

I've often wondered what the shortest BASIC game sold commercially was ...

I just changed my script to include the line count. Samurai Warrior contains 114 lines of BASIC, so I count 249 games with fewer lines than that (but still >=100 lines)...there will of course be many more. I haven't check if these are full games though

[mrcook]

I have one final update: games-with-basic-EN-deduped.txt

After a little more tweaking to my code I now have a list of English only games (sure, maybe I missed a few), and this is also mostly de-duplicated. At the top there's a small selection which seem like they might actually be quite good games (not that I know!), which I'll include here:

• Apocalypse (1983)(Red Shift).tap (Wikipedia)
• Black Crystal (1982)(Carnell).tap
• D-Day (1984)(Games Workshop).tap
• Football Manager (1982)(Addictive Games).tap
• Gordello Incident, The (1989)(Tartan)(Side A).tzx
• Journey's End (1985)(Games Workshop).tap
• Mined Out (1983)(Quicksilva).tap
• Nebula (1984)(Red Shift).tap
• Oracle's Cave, The (1984)(Doric Computer Services).tap
• Rebelstar Raiders (1984)(Red Shift)(Side A).tzx
• Tomb of Akhenaten (1984)(CCS).tzx
• Tripods, The (1985)(Red Shift).tap
• Software Star (1985)(Addictive Games).tap
• Urban Upstart (1983)(Richard Shepherd).tap
• Valhalla (1983)(Legend).tap
• Whodunnit (1984)(CCS).tap

I'm sure there's plenty of more, but I got a bit bored of going through the list :p

[Tan Coul]

I just changed my script to include the line count. Samurai Warrior contains 114 lines of BASIC, so I count 249 games with fewer lines than that (but still >=100 lines)...there will of course be many more. I haven't check if these are full games though

Nice stuff - I've gone through and removed duplicates, CGCs and type-ins and there are 20 shorter than SamWa (as no-one calls it) although some of these seem... dubious?

103 Goolf (1984)(Green Fish Software) - never heard of it but this site says it's a 48K game
103 Showdown (1983)(Artic)
103 Pool (1983)(CDS) - if this is true it's quite an achievement, I played the heck out of this back in the 80s
104 Austerlitz 1805 (1989)(CCS) - this appears to be a pretty complicated wargame
105 3D-Tanx (1982)(DK'Tronics)
106 Mongoose (1982)(Gilsoft)
106 The Price of magik (1986)(Level 9) - 48K game - pretty sure this shouldn't be here!
107 Spectrum Invaders (1983)(Melbourne House)
108 Jogger (1984)(Severn)(16K).tap
108 Timequest (1983)(Mikro-Gen)
109 Attactics (1983)(East London Robotics) - trickstick demo program
109 Reversi (1983)(CDS)
110 3D-Tanx (1982)(DK'Tronics)
110 Flight Simulation (1983)(Sinclair Research)- 48K game - pretty sure this shouldn't be here!
110 Reversi (1982)(Phipps)
111 Puzzler (1983)(Micromega)
111 Spectra Smash (1983)(Romik)
112 Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1987)(Ricochet)- 48K game - pretty sure this shouldn't be here!
112 Spectrum Golf (1982)(R&R)
113 3-D Mazeman (1983)(Melbourne House)
114 Samurai Warrior (1982)(MC Lothlorien)

[mrcook]

...some of these seem... dubious?

I think probably most with fewer than 200 lines of BASIC are dubious!

Thanks for the info tho, I've removed most of those you mentioned, however, there are a few which do seem to be BASIC games: Mongoose, Spectrum Invaders, Jogger, Reversi (including the Phipps), Spectrum Golf, 3-D Mazeman.

Notes: Spectrum Golf has several files of the same game and it seems the "[a3]" one has an extra block of BASIC, which brings the total to 224 lines. Jogger has a couple of machine code blocks (176 bytes and 300 bytes), these could be gfx/sfx or maybe even some small machine code routines. Timequest is unusual: there's about 7K of machine code, so you're probably right, however, Side A has 107 lines of BASIC while Side B has 458 lines!

He are the data blocks for those games:

Code: Select all

$ rio zx geometry ~/Downloads/zx-spectrum/Games/Mongoose\ \(1982\)\(Gilsoft\ International\)\(16K\).tap
DATA BLOCKS:
#01 BASIC Program
    - Filename        : mongoose  
    - AutoStartLine   : 32871
#02 Standard Data: 5882 bytes


$ rio zx geometry ~/Downloads/zx-spectrum/Games/Spectrum\ Invaders\ \(1983\)\(Melbourne\ House\)\(16K\).tzx
DATA BLOCKS:
#01 Standard Speed Data: 19 bytes, pause for 1000 ms
    - BASIC Program
    - Filename        : Invaders  
    - AutoStartLine   : 100
#02 Standard Speed Data: 5167 bytes, pause for 1000 ms
    - Standard Data: 5165 bytes


$ rio zx geometry ~/Downloads/zx-spectrum/Games/Jogger\ \(1984\)\(Severn\)\(16K\).tzx
DATA BLOCKS:
#01 Standard Speed Data: 19 bytes, pause for 1000 ms
    - BASIC Program
    - Filename        : JOGER     
    - AutoStartLine   : 1
#02 Standard Speed Data: 7698 bytes, pause for 1000 ms
    - Standard Data: 7696 bytes
#03 Standard Speed Data: 19 bytes, pause for 1000 ms
    - Machine Code
    - Filename     :           
    - Start Address: 65368
#04 Standard Speed Data: 178 bytes, pause for 1000 ms
    - Standard Data: 176 bytes
#05 Standard Speed Data: 19 bytes, pause for 1000 ms
    - Machine Code
    - Filename     :           
    - Start Address: 32244
#06 Standard Speed Data: 302 bytes, pause for 0 ms
    - Standard Data: 300 bytes


$ rio zx geometry ~/Downloads/zx-spectrum/Games/Reversi\ \(1983\)\(CDS\ Microsystems\)\(16K\).tzx
DATA BLOCKS:
#01 Text Description    : Created with Ramsoft MakeTZX
#02 Standard Speed Data: 19 bytes, pause for 1002 ms
    - BASIC Program
    - Filename        : REVERSI   
    - AutoStartLine   : 0
#03 Standard Speed Data: 6862 bytes, pause for 9023 ms
    - Standard Data: 6860 bytes


$ rio zx geometry ~/Downloads/zx-spectrum/Games/Spectrum\ Golf\ \(1982\)\(R\&R\)\(16K\)\[aka\ ZX\ Spectrum\ Pro-Am\ Golf\].tzx
DATA BLOCKS:
#01 Standard Speed Data: 19 bytes, pause for 1017 ms
    - BASIC Program
    - Filename        : GOLF      
    - AutoStartLine   : 5000
#02 Standard Speed Data: 7515 bytes, pause for 4003 ms
    - Standard Data: 7513 bytes
#03 Standard Speed Data: 19 bytes, pause for 1019 ms
    - BASIC Program
    - Filename        : GOLF      
    - AutoStartLine   : 5000
#04 Standard Speed Data: 7515 bytes, pause for 0 ms
    - Standard Data: 7513 bytes


$ rio zx geometry ~/Downloads/zx-spectrum/Games/3-D\ Mazeman\ \(1983\)\(Melbourne\ House\)\(16K\).tzx
DATA BLOCKS:
#01 Standard Speed Data: 19 bytes, pause for 1000 ms
    - BASIC Program
    - Filename        : 3D Mazeman
    - AutoStartLine   : 100
#02 Standard Speed Data: 7048 bytes, pause for 1000 ms
    - Standard Data: 7046 bytes

[Tan Coul]

Yeh, just to be clear, that list was *all* the commercially released games I coudl find below 114 lines, it was only those in italics I definitely thought were dodgy - though as I said, while I could believe Pool was BASIC, and it is definitely a 16K titel, if they got that done in that few lines I'm mighty impressed

[deanysoft]

I have this rather sad entry. I ended up writing my own version which was also in basic and recording it on the b-side of the tape.

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... Force_Zero

[Journeyman]

Oddly enough, I've just been playing Spectrum Safari, which is really, really awful but strangely addictive. It's about 300 lines of BASIC with a small amount of machine code, mainly for visual effects. You have to guide 3 men marooned on a desert island to safety by visiting villages to buy food and a boat, and you have to complete a bunch of animal-themed puzzles to get there. The puzzles are really weird things like The Kicking Sheep and The Gambling Gorilla, and they're all like the sort of thing you'd find on Cassette 50. Really slow and clunky, and quite stupidly banal. The games are, however, extremely difficult to the point of being utterly frustrating. Completing the whole thing is quite a challenge, but massively disappointing when you do!

Despite this total crapness, I do actually quite enjoy playing it.

[Journeyman]

I have this rather sad entry. I ended up writing my own version which was also in basic and recording it on the b-side of the tape.

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... Force_Zero

Very similar to the ZX81's Bomber, which was quite impressive, but then it was written in machine code and is surprisingly slick for an '81 game. Stuff like that in BASIC on the Speccy was almost an insult to its capabilities.