The classic book BASIC Computer Games, published by Creative Computing, inspired a generation of programmers. The games were written by many people, and compiled by David H. Ahl. The fabulous illustrations accompanying each game were done by George Beker.
Oh, such a classic right here. Swap two balls to make matches of 3 and watch them just bounce away. It was one of their popular games back then. I recall GameHouse mentioning once that they had a.
I've included all the games here for your tinkering pleasure. I've tested and tweaked each one of them to make sure they'll run with Vintage BASIC, though you may see a few oddities. That's part of the fun of playing with BASIC: it never works quite the same on two machines. The games will play better if you keep CAPS LOCK on, as they were designed to be used with capital-letter input.
The table below includes both links to the pages of the book at atariarchives.org, and the source code for each game. I obtained most of the source code from classicbasicgames.org, with the exception of Civil War and Super Star Trek, which I entered myself. The descriptions mainly come from an earlier edition of the book, 101 BASIC Computer Games, via the scans at digibarn.com. All book content is provided with the express consent of David H. Ahl, editor.
You can download the entire set of games as a tarball (bcg.tar.gz) or a ZIP archive (bcg.zip).