Bill Gates once developed a video game in a single night and secured a valuable collaboration as a result.
What kind of game was it? Bill Gates developed a video game called DONKEY.BAS in 1981 together with Neil Konzen, which is considered one of the first games for IBM computer systems.
Donkey follows a simple game principle: you control a car on a two-lane road. On this road, donkeys appear from time to time that you must avoid. You switch lanes by pressing the spacebar (cf.: YouTube).
Donkey is one of the oldest computer games, alongside well-known titles like Pong, Tennis for Two, or Spacewar, which is often used by pirates as a disguise.
Video game secured Microsoft a valuable deal
Why did he develop the game? At that time, Microsoft was still a relatively small and young company, having been founded just 6 years earlier. The then 25-year-old Bill Gates and Neil Konzen developed Donkey as part of a deal with the tech giant IBM.
Microsoft was to equip the company’s computers with an operating system. For this, Microsoft acquired the operating system 86-DOS and renamed it to MS-DOS. However, IBM made the additional request to offer a version of the BASIC programming language and some games on the operating system that would showcase the possibilities of the language.
And so Bill Gates and Neil Konzen developed Donkey. Gates recounted in 2001:
„In fact, it was Neil Konzen and me, sitting in a small room at four o’clock in the morning with this IBM prototype. IBM insisted that we lock the door, and we only had this changing room with a lock, so we had to do all our development in there, and it was always over 100 degrees, but we wrote a little application late at night to show what the BASIC built into the IBM PC could do. And that became DONKEY.BAS (via Business Insider).“
Ultimately, Donkey helped Microsoft finalize the important collaboration with IBM. The deal reportedly brought Microsoft around $430,000 at the time (via PCMag). It is also considered an important step in the rise of today’s tech giant.
The game itself is largely irrelevant by today’s standards. It is old, looks correspondingly poor, and never had particularly impressive gameplay – after all, it was only meant to present the programming language. The competition at Apple even calls Donkey “the most embarrassing game of all time”
