I guess Gorillas and Nibbles didn't come with that book from the article, but with MS-DOS, so to have it with the book would have been a waste of space as they were already present on most systems

The first "programming" I ever did was when we had computer day in third day, I bet a kid I could get to a higher level of Nibbles than he could. I read a BASIC book from the library, found the script and changed the START_LEVEL variable from 1 to 100. 20 some years later, I write code for a living.

The book was originally published before there was an MS-DOS or IBM PCs.

That book was somewhat "old" when I first encountered it as a kid in the 1980s. Most of the code in it was first created for minicomputers in the 1970s, probably running some form of Dartmouth BASIC.

Created maybe but they were published in a sort generic MS BASIC with some tweaking required to get them to run on different machine implementations.

https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=i...