In a world where every byte must justify its existence, a game about gorillas throwing bananas is either a waste of resources or the whole point. There is no middle ground.
MS-DOS 5.0 shipped in June 1991, and hidden in the C:\DOS directory, between the grim utilities and the system files that kept the world running, was GORILLA.BAS — a QBasic program in which two gorillas, perched on the rooftops of a randomly generated city skyline, took turns throwing explosive bananas at each other. The game required the user to input an angle and a velocity. The banana arced across the screen in a parabolic trajectory that would have satisfied any high school physics teacher. When it struck a building, the building sustained damage. When it struck a gorilla, the gorilla performed a brief, triumphant animation, and the round was over. The entire program was 13,566 bytes of interpreted BASIC. It was, by any rational measure, a frivolous use of resources in a world where memory was measured in anxious kilobytes. And yet GORILLA.BAS was included. Microsoft — a company not known for sentimental resource allocation — placed a game about primates and ballistic fruit in the...
From the lore of Conventional Memory.