I remember the same thing and eventually seeing DarkBASIC in stores and PureBASIC on a few shelves as well in the 90s. I gravitated towards BlitzBasic because the developer (Mark Sibly) was genuinely interested and improving his system, forging a good community and making some cool looking stuff along the way. For years I wrote BB, B3D, and a few other dialects of BASIC for doing game-related and demo-related things.