MS-DOS 5 (included games)

MS-DOS 5 was a major update for Microsoft's command-line operating system. Among other changes was a new BASIC variant -- gone were the days of the bundled BASICA, GW-BASIC or QuickBasic interpreters. Now users had QBasic to play with. In addition to two utilities (RemLine and Money Manager), it included two sample games: QBasic Nibbles and QBasic Gorillas.

Nibbles first: in short, it's Microsoft's version of the classic "snake" game. The player navigates their snake so that it can eat up the random numbers appearing on the screen. After consuming a number, the snake grows longer. It dies if it runs into the walls or into its own tail, which grows pretty long after several helpings of numbers. The higher levels feature more walls, therefore, navigating them is more difficult. The game has a two-player mode as well as the standard single-player.

All objects in this game, including the snakes and the walls, are represented by simple ASCII characters in textmode....

Then, there is Gorillas. This is what happens when one takes the classic ballistic artillery game (perhaps the first major application for computers, and a field whose advancement was arguably single-handedly responsible for numerous categories of mathematical development in the West), replace the cannons and cannonballs with gorillas and bananas, place them, like King Kong or George from Rampage, atop buildings of varying heights instead of in the bowls, on the slopes and peaks of hills and valleys, and package it with the QuickBasic interpreter included with MS-DOS 5.0.

The game play is a dense inter-tangling of mathematical formulae that Donkey Kong can only scratch his lousy head enviously at while trying to count on his great monkey paws and do long division in his simian cranium. Players must account for the wind's variable direction and speed as well as a constant gravitational pull in order to attempt to lob banana bombs on an angle and with launch power permitting a trajectory such that it will clear the tops of intervening buildings and land on or near the opposing ape, exploding violently and giving us an unprecedented demonstration of guerrilla warfare. If successful, the top banana does the Donkey Kong (a very brief disco dance sensation); in the event of failure, the human opponent gets an opportunity to plug in some numbers and attempt to do unto others as was done to him, until one of the two is reduced to banana-ape-gunpowder gumbo. In the meantime, the urban landscape is reduced to a wasteland pocked with the craters of near misses -- a wry turning of the tables only too rarely possible among endangered species.