Play Basic Programming Online

You wrestle with the Atari’s awkward keyboard to make a little triangle robot draw lines—it’s more like solving a puzzle than playing a game, but there’s charm in how hard it tries to teach coding on hardware this simple.

Released: 1978

File size: 3.08 KB

Game Overview

Basic Programming on the Atari 2600 is one of those weird, ambitious little experiments from the early days of gaming—where someone at Atari looked at their blocky console and thought, "Yeah, we can teach people to code with this."

You use the clunky keyboard controller to punch in simple commands, making a little triangle-shaped "turtle" move around the screen, drawing lines or repeating patterns. It’s about as basic as programming gets (hence the name), but there’s something oddly satisfying about making it work on hardware that was barely meant to handle Pong.

Honestly, it’s more of a curiosity than a game—definitely not something you’d play for fun today unless you’re really into retro tech or the history of programming education. But as a time capsule from 1978, it’s kind of amazing this even existed. The fact that they tried to turn an Atari into a coding tutor says a lot about how people saw gaming’s potential back then.