About QBasic Gorillas

A free browser remake of GORILLA.BAS, the banana-throwing artillery game that shipped with MS-DOS in 1991 — rebuilt for the modern web and playable in six languages.

What this is

QBasic Gorillas is a turn-based artillery game. Two gorillas stand on a neon skyline; each one takes a turn to throw an explosive banana at the other. You set an angle and a power, a wind pushes the banana off course, and the buildings get in the way. First to win the agreed number of rounds takes the match.

The original: GORILLA.BAS

This game is a tribute to GORILLA.BAS, a short program written in BASIC and shipped inside QBasic, the interpreter that came bundled with MS-DOS 5.0 in June 1991. For a whole generation of PC users it was the first game they ever ran on a computer of their own — and, for many, the first program whose source code they opened, changed, and ran again.

GORILLA.BAS was tiny. It drew two gorillas and a city out of coloured blocks, animated the banana as a dot travelling along a real ballistic arc, and let two players pass the keyboard back and forth. It had gravity, it had wind, and it had a banana that exploded. That was the whole game, and it was enough.

Its other life was educational. Because the source was right there — readable, editable, in a language designed to be learned — thousands of people changed it. Some turned the bananas into other projectiles, some added terrain, and plenty taught themselves to program by breaking it on purpose. It is one of the most copied and taught pieces of code of the DOS era.

Who is behind this

This remake is built by The Studio of Javier Mendoza, based in Málaga, Spain. It is a labour of nostalgia: the same game, with the physics tuned, the presentation brought forward thirty years, and a few things the original could never have had.

What the remake adds

• Multiplayer that needs no account: start a match, share the code, and a friend joins from their own phone or computer.
• Play against the CPU, two of you on the same keyboard, or each on your own screen.
• Online leaderboards, 24 achievements, and unlockable taunts and special attacks.
• Six languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, German and Russian.
• Zero runtime dependencies. The engine is a canvas, a few oscillators and plain JavaScript.

It runs in the browser, on desktop and mobile, and it is free.

Credits and licence

GORILLA.BAS was distributed by Microsoft with QBasic and has no connection to this project; the name QBasic Gorillas is used descriptively, to say what the game is. The code, art, sound and texts of this remake belong to The Studio of Javier Mendoza, except where noted.