A QBasic Text Adventure Still Expanding in 2025
the-ventureweaver.itch.io
the-ventureweaver.itch.io
My best good friend still has a copy of it someplace on a floppy disk because we would run it on the computer that he put together out of spare parts on a piece of plywood. Thankfully he has a family and is too busy to dig it up and send it to me so I'm spared the embarrassment that would come with seeing it.
I'm always happy to see projects like this and OHRRPGCE where people did something useful with the language.
http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/
Ans this site has more
It was a popular style of project. Some even implemented their own programming languages so they could multitask applications written for them by running lines from each app in a round-robin fashion.
Because QBasic would run on versions of Windows NT that had the NTVDM (virtual DOS machine) I used it as a scripting language on early NT systems I supported. Eventually I moved over to VBScript under Windows Scripting Host when it arrived on the scene.
Me too! Well, sort of. Between the ages of 14 and 19 I worked as a part-time helpdesk technician. When I started we used a series of bootable floppies with DOS to use Symantec Ghost. If memory serves two floppies were required - the first had DOS and the requisite NIC driver and the second was universal and merely had GHOST.EXE on it. I developed a bootable USB memory stick image comprising all of the NIC drivers along with Ghost and a series of other useful things like a WinPE environment and maaaaaybe a Linux one via loadlin.exe. I ended up making a boot menu/shell for it in QuickBasic.
It was still in use a year or two after I'd moved to doing software engineering professionally. I wonder whether it's sitting in a drawer someplace on the other side of the country. I also wonder how this thread turned into a chronicle of my youthful programming misadventures :-D
I remember first reading about the DATA command in the IDE built-in help (what a fantastic resource) and laboriously copying my drawings of monsters on graph paper into lines of comma-delimited ones and zeroes in DATA statements.
Since we had a copy of QuickBasic 4.5 I was able to compile it to an EXE and place it in the AUTOEXEC.BAT - fun times!
Hacking EXPLORER.EXE and changing the Start Menu side graphic with Borland Resource Workshop was another notable one.
Watching an adult try to navigate in Windows with an invisible mouse was like the digital equivalent of using a dowsing rod to find water.
Also still active after 29 years in development :) and even still looks much the same as its MS-DOS days.... so decades of work left to do. Recently ported to modern consoles (for Fighto Fantasy & Axe Cop RPG)!
I hope it didn't take too long for you to discover the wonder of GOSUB -- simulating it with GOTO and IF is a pain! GOSUB is just a single x86 'call' instruction and RETURN a single 'ret' instruction. So simple; a taste of assembly programming without stack frames. I even reimplemented GOSUB/RETURN as macros with assembly in FreeBASIC that way (you could just push to the stack). And putting all your code in a single scope, no locals/globals/arguments, makes coding more "fun".
I wonder what you'd consider the tradeoffs of QBasic vs something intentionally geared towards IF, like Inform[0]?
Also the game would run on PC's, Linux/BSD machines, DOS, Classic Macs, Amiga, Ataris, Android, IOS, OSX, RiscOS... everywhere from 16 bit and up.
I shared your post on twostopbits.com. A site dedicated to retro gaming and computing. Would love to have you share your story over there.
You can check out Roblox Studio - https://create.roblox.com/landing
And Luau is the scripting language - https://luau.org
Qbasic was implicitly like under 18. There were a few hobbyist adults but they were rare. Roblox and Minecraft occupy the same space but they are more explicitly youth spaces.
This exploration made me realize that there probably are genuinely people over 40 with no children around who enjoy these modern platforms like Minecraft and Roblox without any questionable intent.
And honestly I think there has to be one other distinction here. Take Reddit. It's gone from implicitly to arguably explicitly a young person's space, but then there are subreddits dedicated to people of specific ages or to issues that teens face, this is yet another level - explicit and exclusive.
With the advent of age verification systems online it makes me wonder if there's going to ever be enforced youth exclusive spaces, which is probably the final corner of the quadrant here
I learned two things: QBasic, and don't ask good faith questions to script kiddies in the Partyvan IRC
Have you considered just making the game directly playable online? Sure, this eliminates the "potentially pay me some money" funnel associated with the download link, but it would be a lot more friendly to casual onlookers such as Hacker News.
To make that happen, you'd embed DOSBox on the page itself, with a preloaded disk image containing the .exe (and/or the .bas source plus an interpreter). I have a tutorial/example here, which (six years later) still seems to run fine: https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2019/08/11/dragonflight/
Unfortunately, when I start the exe file in DOSBox Staging it only clears the screen, shows me a blinking cursor, and then does not seem to do anything beyond that.
OP says that they've been at it for decades so my guess would be it started as a QBASIC game but then was later ported over to use QB64 and its modern features.
The reason why it fails to do that is that the compiler did not set the memory allocation fields in the header correctly, so the stack is either overwriting random memory or may be somewhere that isn't writable at all!
Apparently nobody tests this stub code anymore, might as well leave it out completely...
(maybe Windows even accepts files that start with the PE header instead of MZ?)
Not what I expect for a game written in QBasic
I recently set it up on my Mac, and then on my iPad, so I could get access to the decades worth of Turbo C and Turbo Pascal code I found in my archives.