Starting in 1991, every copy of MS-DOS (and many versions of Windows) included a hidden artillery game called Gorillas. It inspired a generation of programmers and drew the ire of computer lab instructors everywhere. Here’s how it came to be—and how to play it today.
I played the hell out of this as a kid. Such a simple but fun game, and the fact so many people had no idea it existed made it all the more exciting, like we had some secret knowledge especially grownups weren’t privy to.
And on the desktop there existing the possibilities to
– using DosBox and the original QBasic and GORILLAS.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS to run it n the DosBox
– using QB64 (https://www.qb64.net/ , https://qb64.org/) to compile your GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS to your favorite platform.
Oh NIBBLES! i had totally forgotten about that one, i played that a lot too. My first homemade game was a snake game heavily inspired by nibbles 🙂
I remember finding this when switching to QBasic after i got tired of programming on a C64. I tried to figure out how it worked, but it was too advanced for me at the time, but it was really fun to play. QBasic was such a huge improvement and a joy to work with coming from the C64, and even though i pretty quickly moved on to C to get away from its limitations, i might not have made it so far if i hadn’t poked around in dos and discovered it existed as moving directly to C might have been too steep a learning curve.
Oh the “good” old times of learning programming with just the built in help and a few hugely outdated public library books.
While i am happy today how things turned out, i am still pretty angry that this was what i had to do as an 11 year old child to stimulate myself because the school system had nothing to help spot and challenge those above average. But it was fun much later in life to try to work through self esteem issues after a life of low grades and being called lazy until i finally realized the truth.
I’m not sure how I never came across this back when I was playing about with QBASIC programming.
I keep a copy of the QBasic executable, along with GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS, with DOSBox on my computer at home! It’s good memories of my childhood and my beginnings as a programmer. I wish I still had a copy of the “Mega Man RPG” I was working on in QBasic. My biggest accomplishment was getting the “boss select music” to play on the internal PC speaker. 😀
Occasionally I’m tempted to install an old school programming environment and go back to the nostalgic days of programming chunky gray text on a blue screen, but nowadays the modern PICO-8 fantasy console has scratched that itch for me.
There was never anything “secret” about that game. The article title is just misleading clickbait.