Meteor

A simple "character graphics arcade game" which puts the player in charge of an ASCII smiley face. The objective: erase the solid blocks and avoid getting splattered by falling meteors. Points are scored by consuming the 3 rectangular target blocks, or the trails left by the meteors as they streak across the screen; for each block hit by a meteor, you lose a point instead. The difficulty level determines the location of the blocks: the higher it is, the closer they are to the top of the screen where the meteors are spawned.

Meteor! was created as an experiment by the author to test the capabilities of his university's then-new IBM PCs, which came without the optional color graphics or joysticks, and see if an arcade-like game could be written in BASIC despite those shortcomings. This version was later republished in Creative Computing Magazine. The PC/Blue series of shareware/freeware compilation disks included a modified version of the game; here, the difficulty level increases as you progress, and every 1000 points the blocks are automatically redrawn higher up the screen.