Talk:Gorillas (video game)

Gates rumor

I'd heard rumors that Microsoft founder Bill Gates co-wrote this program. Can anyone confirm or deny these rumors?--arugulaz

Incredulity fallacy

I don't see how this game can be based on Scorched Earth, when MSDOS 5 was released at the same time. This kind of trajectory/ballistics game was a staple of the early 8-bit scene, predating Scorched Earth by about ten years. --scruss 17:37, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Revival

The revival section suggested that Scorched Earth was based on Gorilla, this can only be seen as speculation without any proof, as Gorilla.bas claims copyright in 1991, and Scorched Earth was released the same year. --tonsofpcs _(Talk) 22:08, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, Gorilla.bas actually claims copyright in 1990. It was packaged with MS-DOS 5.0 which was released on 11 June 1991 (although the files on the floppies are dated 9 April 1991, and beta testing began in April 1990). Scorched Earth v1.0 was released after 31 July 1991, but according to the author, he started working on it in 1990, and was inspired by an early text-only artillery game, not Gorillas. —Deadcode 17:57, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Neither Gorilla nor scorched earth is the original in any case. An earlier version of DOS came with a game called Qships, also written in QBASIC that was very similar to Gorrila. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.197.215.43 (talk) 12:33, August 22, 2007 (UTC)

Proposed rename

I think this game is more properly called Gorillas, because whereas the file is named Gorilla.bas, the comment heading and the intros say QBasic Gorillas. Any objections to moving this page to Gorillas (computer game), adding a redirect for the old title, and renaming all appropriate instances of "Gorilla" to match? —Deadcode 16:20, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Although you are right, most people I know including myself seem to refer to this game as 'Gorilla'. peaNee 17:11, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Pinikas, if you played the game when it was released back in the MS-DOS days, you wouldn't refer to it as "Gorilla". --NakiBest 13:09, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

NakiBest you're right. After a little research, here's the intro screen of the game:

Sorry for beeing wrong :). pinikas 13:23, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Negative gravity?

As the article states: It is also possible to set this(gravity) to a negative value, causing the bananas to fall upwards. I was surprised when I read this, as I spent days playing Gorilla when I was a kid and never discovered this easter egg. So of course, I went and tested it out on the original version. Interestingly, I could not get it to work. Does anyone know what the source of this claim is? I can't find any other information about this on the net, leading me to believe it untrue, at least for the original version of gorilla.bas. Slugmaster 09:40, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I checked the source code and you are right, you can't set gravity to a negative value in the game. You can see that in SUB GetInputs where the following IF statement defines that gravity# variable cannot be negative:

LOOP UNTIL gravity# > 0 OR LEN(grav$) = 0.

Of course someone could change this to anything like LOOP UNTIL gravity# > -100 or even completely remove the DO...LOOP statement, in order to achieve negative gravity. pinikas 10:39, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Platforms

For some reason, Gorillas has been listed under MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98, and Windows NT 4.0. This is nonsense. Strictly speaking, the correct platform would be QBasic, since it's an interpreted language. But the only official QBasic interpreter has been a DOS program, so lacking this the only correct platform is MS-DOS. That it runs under several Windows versions is irrelevant, most DOS games do.

NOT W3.1

As for distribution, Gorillas was definitely not distributed with Windows 3.1, since QBasic was not a part of the Windows 3.1 package. I'm not sure about Windows 95, 98, and NT, and personally I doubt it, but I can't verify it at the moment.—Graf Bobby (talk) 13:15, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

NPOV

I changed the first sentence to "first distributed with MS-DOS 5", so as to neither indicate nor exclude a possible distribution with Windows 95/98/NT. Personally I doubt it, since QBasic was not an integral part of these operating systems, as it was for MS-DOS 5, but as I said I can't verify it at the moment.—Graf Bobby (talk) 16:09, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

.NET

The .NET version downloads on the linked page go to Rapidfire which has pages that circumvent popup blocks and attempt to install malware. The download itself is also password protected. I'm not sure if any of that violates the Wikipedia rules.24.246.158.86 (talk) 21:51, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

IIRC

To my memory the game was distributed with Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 as a COM or EXE file. DouglasHeld (talk) 13:24, 26 June 2020 (UTC)