DONKEY.BAS Turns 45: The Gates-Coded IBM PC Demo Gets a Browser Revival

A developer has rebuilt DONKEY.BAS in JavaScript to mark the 45th anniversary of the one-button game that shipped with early IBM PC DOS. Originally coded in BASICA by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Neil Konzen in 1981, the program existed less as a game than as a showcase for the PC’s CGA color graphics and PC speaker sound. Gameplay is famously minimal: you steer a car between two lanes and dodge a donkey blocking the road, with any collision ending the run.

The port recreates the original CGA look and feel in the browser, playable by tapping space or the screen to switch lanes and Esc to return to the title screen. The author notes some liberties were taken versus the 131-line original, whose source is available on GitHub.

The project sits squarely in the software-preservation and retro-computing tradition — keeping an artifact of early PC history runnable without emulators or period hardware. Its appeal is cultural rather than technical: DONKEY.BAS is a small but well-known piece of Microsoft and IBM PC lore, and a browser version makes it trivially accessible to a new audience.