Donkey

Donkey is not a game most people would seek out for its depth, but it may be one of the most historically significant programs in this entire catalog. Written in 1981 and bundled with the IBM PC's version of BASIC, it was co-authored by a young Bill Gates and Microsoft's Neil Konzen as a showcase for the new machine's color graphics and sound. That pedigree alone makes it a genuine piece of computing history.

The gameplay itself is almost comically simple. You drive a car up a straight road and must swerve to avoid donkeys that appear in your lane, pressing a key to switch lanes before you crash. There is no real progression beyond racking up a score and trying not to hit the animals, and the crude blocky visuals reflect its origins as a technology demonstration rather than a serious title.

As entertainment it lasts about a minute; as an artifact it is fascinating. Donkey stands as a snapshot of the earliest days of the PC, when the men who would go on to build a software empire were knocking out a driving toy to prove what their platform could do. Worth a look purely for the sense of touching the very beginning of the personal computer era.