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About the QBasic Games Directory

The main objective of the QBasic Games Directory is to collect, archive and offer to public all worthy QBasic games. Worthy is a rather clumsy term, but I'm trying to avoid the word "all" since trying to archive all the QBasic games ever made would be a foolish task. First of all, that's impossible. Many QBasic games were never made public or were on the Internet for couple of months before some site went down with it. Second of all, the number of subpar, unplayable and difficult to start QBasic games is staggering and archiving them would be a sensless task. For many people QBasic was their first programming lanaguage, and the first tool they used to learn programming. In that sense many of their first creations are simply not "archiving-worthy". Also, it would mean decreasing the overall quality of the QBasic games in the directory and giving a bad image of QBasic games.

The QBasic Games Directory is primary meant to host and archive GAMES not DEMOS, but it does feature some demos. Why the directory is not quite opened to demos is because of the same reasons why a large number of below average games will never be included. Many demos are nothing but a game engine showcases and are unplayable. They don't feature any progress and don't result in a rewarding experience. And often, many of them are uncompiled and difficult to start. One group of demos that are included are the ones that feature something exceptional in any perspective. A great game engine, brilliant graphics, etc. Second group of demos that are included are the ones that basically work as a complete game. The are playable but lack some feature which the designer originally imagined. A demo that features one episode out of three or something like that. The most important is that the game engine has to be finished. The perfect example for such kind of demo is Lost 2. It features one episode out of three planned. The game engine is finished. The game is challenging, has a beginning and an end.

If the QBasic Games Directory has goals that would be preserving QBasic games for historical purposes. This site will be online as long as I can host it or I'm able to find someone to host it. A community of any sort is not a condition for its existence.

Why the QBasic Games Directory?

The biggest motivator for the creation of this archive was the arrival of FreeBASIC, a 32-bit BASIC compiler around November of 2004. The majority of people in the QBasic community were switching to FreeBASIC over night, abandoning their QBasic projects and sites and turning them into FreeBASIC projects and sites. With years, the usage of QBasic as a hobby dev tool reduced to almost non-existent. With that in mind and in my opinion, the history of the QBasic game design scene had to be archived and written down. The QBasic game design scene was always something special and unique in the programming world. Never such a tight community involved around a single programming language existed. It would be a shame that the creations of those community got lost.