Yes! I played this as a kid. Until then, I didn't realize such things were possible with QBasic. From that point, I wanted to make my own game. I remember looking at the source code and thinking I'd never be able to figure out how a program that long works.<p>It's funny how trivial it looks now.
Related: A fun story about DONKEY.BAS [1] told by Andy Hertzfeld exists where he reminisces about comparing an 8088 with the Macintosh project and how they were disappointed at the lack of ingenuity.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Donkey.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Donkey.txt</a>
Wonder how many people here got interested in development because of spending time poring over GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS? I know it was my first exposure to source code, and the ability to create your own game.<p>Sad that MacOS/Windows no longer includes any simple source code for curious explorers to discover.
Gorilla.bas is okay, but if you're going to load up nibbles.bas please fix the bug where the number permanently disappears if the Pause dialog covers it. Thanks.<p>(Also, the block-drawing character tricks in Nibbles were rather neat little affairs.)
If you just want to go ahead and play it, Gorilla is re-implemented in flash ready to run in the browser at:<p><a href="http://www.kongregate.com/games/Moly/gorillas-bas" rel="nofollow">http://www.kongregate.com/games/Moly/gorillas-bas</a>
I didn't remember that you could do graceful degradation with qbasic :p<p><pre><code> 'This is a clever way to pick the best graphics mode available
ON ERROR GOTO ScreenModeError
Mode = 9
SCREEN Mode</code></pre>