Coincidentally, I recently located my first published BASIC game in an 80's magazine, on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/1984-12-compute-magazine (page 79 if you're truly curious)

Back in that era I worked for Compute! magazine as an "editorial programmer". People would submit BASIC games to the magazine for some particular 8-bit micro (as in the linked story above), and it was the job of the editorial programmers to port the game to other computers. I did the Apple ][ ports. I got the job (high school, so after school) through a friend who did the C64 ports.