Bill Gates is quite a technology character. We remember him for many things, but among them the profile of a video game developer has never been. However, during one night in 1981, Gates had to create donkey to close a deal with IBM.
While it is true that Microsoft is currently much more important on the world stage than IBM, In the 1980s they were quite on par, even with the “Blue Giant” (IBM’s popular nickname) surpassing Gates’ company. in various aspects. Therefore, being able to sell them software was a task of utmost importance.
In the rush of having to convince people at IBM, Bill Gates developed donkey, a video game in which the rules are simple: you drive a car on a road and with the space bar you change to the opposite lane in which you are traveling, avoiding at all costs colliding with the donkeys. The movement was vertical upwards and in some sense is similar to the “Google dinosaur game” (called Dinosaur Game).
The idea was not just to develop a video game for the sake of it, but to Microsoft was offering BASIC as a programming language for IBM computers and few things like a video game to demonstrate its functionality. donkey It was created in the company of Neil Konzen, a Microsoft developer who stayed until four in the morning with Gates to finish the product.
A criticized title
According to the Mein-MMO portal, Apple did not miss the opportunity to criticize Microsoft’s development. Let us remember that in those years the competition between companies was fierce: Nintendo saying bluntly that it was better than SEGA, Apple itself creating commercials to discredit IBM or the trial between Apple and Microsoft due to the similarities between the operating systems of both. companies.
In the words of a former Apple employee named Andy Hertzfeld, Donkey was not only a very bad game, it was embarrassing:
“[Donkey] It was the most embarrassing game. The player was supposed to drive a car on a poorly rendered, slowly moving road, and could press the space bar to change the jerky motion. From time to time, a brown blur filled the screen, and it was assumed to be a donkey manifesting itself in the middle of the road. If you didn’t press the space bar in time, you would crash into the donkey and lose the game.”
Additionally, Hertzfeld mentions that Neil Konzen was a young, brilliant programmer who was known at Apple for having worked on the creation of the Apple II. According to his story, it seemed strange to him that he turned in work that was “this bad.”
“We were surprised to see that the comments at the top proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen. Neil was a brilliant teenage hacker whom I knew from his work on the Apple II (who would later become responsible for Microsoft technician on the Mac project), but we were surprised that such a completely bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft’s co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit in the comments.”
Terrible or not, Microsoft ended up closing the deal with IBM to incorporate BASIC into its personal computer version. The development of Donkey remains a curious anecdote from the leader of one of the most important technology companies in the world, who at some point worked programming how a car collided with a donkey.
