One of the reasons I bought an Apple ][e was to write programs using the built-in BASIC interpretor. I spent countless enjoyable hours writing programs and typing in programs, line-by-line, from books like David H. Ahl's BASIC Computer Games. These games initially appeared in Ahl's Creative Computing magazine, which ran from 1974-1985. The Internet Archive has scans of many issues.
Our friend and Boing Boing BBS creator Jeff Atwood is leading a project to rewrite the games in Ahl's books using modern languages like Java, Python, and C#. Read about Atwood's reasons for doing this here.
