Microsoft founder Bill Gates once stayed up all night to build a game called ‘Donkey' that former Apple employee called ‘most embarrassing'

Time of India

25-04-2025

Microsoft founder and former CEO Bill Gates once developed a video game in a single night, Called
DONKEY.BAS
, it was a simple 8-bit racing game where players maneuvered a vehicle to avoid donkeys. During a 2001 keynote, Gates shared that he along with Neil Konzen, a programmer at Microsoft stayed up until 4am to build the game.The reason? A 26-year-old Gates then wanted to impress IBM and secure a deal with the company. But it did not have an operating system. With DONKEY.BAS, Gates wanted to prove that his software could be powerful and versatile enough for the IBM platform.
Although the game failed to impress IBM, it helped Gates gain IBM partnership, it went on to establish Microsoft in the tech world.
How Microsoft founder Bill Gates described DONKEY.BAS
Speaking during a 2001 keynote, Gates said:
'Actually, it was myself and Neil Konzen at four in the morning with this prototype IBM PC sitting in this small room. IBM insisted that we had to have a lock on the door and we only had this closet that had a lock on it, so we had to do all our development in there and it was always over 100 degrees, but we wrote late at night a little application to show what the Basic built into the IBM PC could do. And so that was Donkey.bas. It was at the time very thrilling.'
The story of DONKEY.BAS does not end here. Andy Hertzfeld, a former Apple employee once recalled the first time Macintosh team saw an IBM PC and singled out DONKEY.BAS as the 'most embarrassing game' on the IBM PC."
What Apple's Andy Hertzfeld said about DONKEY.BAS game
Hertzfeld wrote:
'The most embarrassing game was a lo-res graphics driving game called 'Donkey'. The player was supposed to be driving a car down a slowly scrolling, poorly rendered 'road', and could hit the space bar to toggle the jerky motion. Every once in a while, a brown blob would fill the screen, which was supposed to be a donkey manifesting in the middle of the road. If you didn't hit the space bar in time, you would crash into the donkey and lose the game.
We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen. Neil was a bright teenage hacker who I knew from his work on the Apple II (who would later become Microsoft's technical lead on the Mac project) but we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.'