The Basic Game

Not many people had home computers as a kid and console shit was a rarity in 80's Britain, so our sole reference for video games was the arcade games in random places such as the chippy or the takeaway. So the rare people I knew with home micros were a revelation.

A mate had an old speccy computer, and a black and white TV. He had a few games for the system including a vertical scrolling football game (this would have been about 87 if anyone wants to try and track this down, It may have been called football fun but that seems highly unlikely, and scrolling through a list of speccy games on the worldofspectrum site nothing seems to ring a bell.


Apart from sketchy memories of old soccer games and playing Buckaroo. We played another game that he'd made up entirely. TBH the game I'm describing here is pretty much system agnostic and 'runs' on any computer system with basic. Hell if I give you the instructions you can run this in notepad.

I can only remember this as the basic game and works like this:

One person types out three lines of random numbers into basic and the other person, either turns away or shuts their eyes.  When the typing is over, you must designate a number that is the kill number, one that which must be avoided at all costs. You then call out to the person to make their move by saying top, middle or bottom and see if they can make it to the end of the line, one space at a time, without hitting the kill number.

I suppose you could, if you were good at programming, make this up in basic for any of the classic computers, print up a random string of numbers that fill 3 lines, blank the screen and then put a cursor onscreen with the prompt to move either top, middle or bottom, via arrow keys (or more likely w a s d).

In fact this is the sort of thing that would probably have been a basic type in back in the day complete with typos and a fantastical plot.