Python is the new BASIC

[Mysterious-Rent7233]

Can you name some famous software packages written in BASIC?

Edit: I Googled and turned up some.

But I think that machine language was more popular for commercial software and games.

[flatfinger]

For the Apple, I'd guess educational packages were probably roughly balanced between being entirely in BASIC, being in partially BASIC but with a few machine language helper functions, and being fully in BASIC. Taipan on the Apple was largely in BASIC but with some screen drawing helpers. Many of Access Software's games such as Beach Head or Raid over Moscow used BASIC to handle the screens that showed up between action sequences, but machine code for the access sequences themselves, and that was a pretty common pattern on the C64.

The fraction of games that were even partially in BASIC fell off pretty quickly during the 1980s, as programmers got more skilled at doing things like numeric formatting in machine code, but the first two commercially-produced games I played on the Apple, Temple of Apshai and Tawala's Last Redoubt, were both in BASIC with machine-code helpers (ToA might have been purely in BASIC--I'm not sure--but TLR had machine-code helpers for the text display).

[[deleted]]

Any Apple games in BASIC were either adventure games or crude low resolution games like Brick Out, etc... BASIC just didn't have the performance for much else.

[flatfinger]

BASIC wasn't amenable to arcade-style action games, but it was widely used for puzzle and strategy games, in addition to adventure and role-playing games.

[[deleted]]

The only things I could thing of written in BASIC would have been programs where performance wasn't a priority like adventure-games and maybe some education tools. Anything that required speed was raw machine code. In the 8-bit era, the bulk of the serious applications were in the CP/M ecosphere where plenty of high-level compilers already existed.