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[agj]

I never made anything interesting with it nor did I learn much beyond loops, but basic was still my first programming language.

[Ryan J. Bury]

Ah, QB!

Just like so many other people here, QuickBASIC 4.5 was the first language I coded in, back when I first became interested in writing games.  In fact, one of the main inspirations when I wrote Afterlife: Rickard's Quest was to re-incorporate some elements from a game I'd written many years ago in QB, called "Stick You", a platformer in which the player character was a stick (yes, as in a bit of wood) - a conceit I went with primarily because a little brown line was one of the easiest things to draw on the screen using "LINE"!

Shame I don't have copies of most of my old QB games now, actually.

[deadeye]

That's really advanced. I used to add a few PSET lines at a time and run to see how it looked.

I was like 25 at the time .  But yeah, I'd been using QuickBasic, and BASIC in general off and on since I was maybe 10 years old.  That drawing program was pretty much the culmination of all my worldly BASIC knowledge crammed into a solid month of hard work.

I pretty much stick to game makers now.  The only other "language" I've ever bothered to learn was HyperTalk for HyperCard.  I think BASIC and HyperCard kind of spoiled me, because I can't understand these new-fangled, fancy OOP languages for shit.

[Aquin]

Hypercard was amazing. 

I still remember the King's Quest-like I made in Hypercard which was based on Alice in Wonderland.  And of course I did my fair share of stickman-death animations like *everyone* else.  :D

[JamesGecko]

I too learned to program in QBasic. I made a two-button, four player Tron game. I have a vague idea that I started working on something using sprites, but it was a while back. Scrolling levels seemed really confusing at the time, and anything using 3D was essentially magic.

Did anyone else learn the language using the RadioHands tutorials?

[Ryan J. Bury]

Hah - I actually learned QB from the manual explaining Spectrum Basic that came with my ZX+2!

[gummikana]

Oh god yes I remember Quick Basic. It was awesome.

Here are some random things I did.

Before I learned about SCREEN I created all my "graphics" with LOCATE and PRINT. I did a platformer this way. And logic was, that if player pressed forward I would GOTO to another section where I would draw the whole room again with LOCATE and PRINT but the player would be drawn in a different spot. I did for about 10 rooms all together with this elaborate technique.

When I learned about SCREEN I did all my graphics with DRAW function. I made a graphics editor that would allow me to move around one pixel at a time. And then it would print the DRAW data on the screen. I would then write it down and the rewrite it in code and I would have awesome graphics.

I can't remember where I got it, but I found a "showpcx.exe" which would draw a PCX file on the screen if the screenmode was right. It would also change the palette to the palette of the image. This with Deluxe Paint was heaven on earth.