This was the progenitor of other such classics as gorilla.bas. I liked that it was "poorly" written, as it made it accessible - and I made the leap from c64/amiga/acorn to ms-dos because I knew there was at least one language (basic) on there that I could use.

Promptly after switching I learned c and never looked back, but there's a lot to be said for what these early open-source (ykwim) games unlocked.

Hell, I started coding because I wanted to play games, and could only do so by copying them into a micro from a magazine (storage media was prohibited) - and fairly promptly wanted to cheat - and before I even really realised, was writing my own games and finding holes in the micro's interpreter that could cause entertaining crashes (I still fondly remember the look of panic on the geography (that was the nearest thing to computers, I guess?) teacher's face on coming into a lab (air raid shelter) full of vdus displaying a garbled mess).

So yeah, "bad" code can be great to learn from at an early level.

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