ASCII Magazine - Yasuhiro Miyata | 1982 | PC-8001 (N-BASIC)
Not too long before writing this page, I was at Cleveland Gaming Classic '23 (go to the Conventions page to see a little seciton about just that). You may notice I have a video of Noelle playing a silly little skiing game on the PC-8001, this page is about exactly that.
After our PC-9801DA had sold on day one of the show, we had a big 'ol gap in our table. Luckily I brought a backup system (a PC-8001), not ten minutes later it was set up for people to enjoy. It just ran BASIC for all of day one, we didn't have time to key anything in as the show was busy, but we decided that it should run something fun for day two.
I've always been a fan of the one-liner/ten-liner BASIC competitions that people ran both back in the day and still in modern times on some forum boards. A whole gaming using nothing but a screen or so of text is such a cool idea!
After not that long (like thirty minutes?) of searching on Google, I found exactly that for N-BASIC.
miyatayasu has a really nice little series on their note detailing a project to archive bits of early Japanese game devleopment in a compilation book. One of the entries (#8) talks about a program they made for a 1982 programming contest held by ASCII.
It's a simple slalom game. You're riding down a hill, obstacles are coming towards you, and you need to dodge them. The farther down the screen you get, the higher your score.
Control are dead simple, F5 to start (that's the BAISC "RUN(cr)" key) with your default movement going left while the spacebar moves you right. Easy enough, eh?
We keyed in the ten lines plus three characters of text and sat back to see what people thought.
The game was an honest hit at the convention! At least two people would come up and give the game a few runs ever hour, some just because the PC-8001 looked so neat and others because they've never seen something running BASIC in their life.
I had no idea that even a simple BASIC program would keep the attention of so many people but I'm definitely going to keep that in mind for the future! It really was a satisfying sight, a good opportunity to teach people something new, and seriously cool way to attract people to the table.
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