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Poking about in early issues of Dr Dobbs' Journal (the journal of the People's Computer Company, or PCC) I came across a listing for BASIC games available on tape. Many of these are widespread, but a number I have not heard of and Google is not helping. Does anyone have listings for:

  • Motie
  • Rescue
  • Trader (assume early version of space trader?)
  • Crash
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    a note for future explorers: Bob Albrecht of PCC's domain dragonfun.net has gone through a lot of owners and most of them are quite NSFW. If it's a newer archive than 2001 or so, click with care ...
    – scruss
    Oct 31, 2019 at 15:13

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Here is the listing for Motie, followed immediately by Rescue. The full list of archived issues of People's Computer Co. (PCC) is here.

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  • Unfortunately, the OCR provided by that didn't work very well: 31'" III" C'fISI 'SAV[ "001'1 FO" IS TU"NS .... GOT) IHU 'CONTINU[
    – OrangeDog
    Oct 29, 2019 at 11:46
  • Most excellent! I'll use that to track down the original.
    – Maury Markowitz
    Oct 29, 2019 at 13:00
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    @StopHarmingMonica If you want an authentic 70s BASIC gamer experience, then there is only one way to get printed code into your computer: Type it off by hand :)
    – Philipp
    Oct 29, 2019 at 13:04
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    @Philipp even better: not realise you can edit previous lines, so every time you make a mistake start over from scratch
    – OrangeDog
    Oct 29, 2019 at 13:06
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I have a book of printed BASIC computer games I got on eBay by David H. Ahl. I bought this for nostalgic purposes and for actually running on my homemade Z80 computer running BASIC. I had this book as a kid and it was my introduction to programming, a lifelong pursuit and career...

I think Ahl published two books, a yellow one and a red one. Look on Amazon or eBay for used volumes.

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I stumbled across another good source. When I had my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I and was in college, I used to subscribe to SoftSide Magazine which published games for Radio Shack, Atari, and Apple computers. This link goes directly to an issue I was searching for because I played the game on the cover so much that I ported it to my Commodore 64, and later to the IBM PC.

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The page has a hint that the games are listed in What to Do After you Hit Return.

  • Trader is Star Trader, as listed starting on page 143

  • Crash is a modified version of Lunar Lander, listed on page 151.

While typing in the code would be a chore, maybe searching for comment strings will turn up the full source.

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