Taipan - a BASIC game, explored
57Hello, and welcome to Programming Like It's 1979. Today I want to show you some really great artifacts from the 1980s. It'll be fun, educational, and maybe we will learn something about how large software projects were possible even back when tools were much more primitive.
The artifacts in question are related to the game "Tai-Pan", a game first written in 1979 for the TRS-80 Model I computer, and then ported to the Apple II in 1982; at the time, Steve Wozniak described it as his favorite game, and he wasn't alone in that opinion. The reason we're talking about Tai-Pan isn't just the game though. In 1986, the author, Art Canfil, published an entire book walking through the entire program, literally line by line, where he explained both the design choices he made and also the implementation details
There are lots of versions of Taipan that you can try, but probably the most convenient is http://www.taipangame.com, which you can play in your web browser. The book that I discuss in this video can be found at https://archive.org/details/TaipanAHistoricalAdventureForTheAppleComputerAppleIIEdition