Certainly for the likes of adventure games, BASIC was fine as there was no need for fast animation. There were games that were a mix - using BASIC for intro screen, score display etc and then using assembler for movement. I too remember "100% machine code" as a selling point.
Football Manager in the UK was massively successful - it allowed you to manage a football(OK soccer) team through a season. It was written in BASIC and was a huge success across many platforms for many years. I have no doubt it inspired coders to create the "Football Manager" and "Championship Manager" games of today which are pretty sophisticated now and are massive sellers here. http://www.championshipmanager.co.uk
The main problem with BASIC back then was that it wasn't compiled code - compiled BASIC would have been all right. 8 bit micros had interpreted BASIC which was the problem.
Certainly for the likes of adventure games, BASIC was fine as there was no need for fast animation. There were games that were a mix - using BASIC for intro screen, score display etc and then using assembler for movement. I too remember "100% machine code" as a selling point.
Football Manager in the UK was massively successful - it allowed you to manage a football(OK soccer) team through a season. It was written in BASIC and was a huge success across many platforms for many years. I have no doubt it inspired coders to create the "Football Manager" and "Championship Manager" games of today which are pretty sophisticated now and are massive sellers here. http://www.championshipmanager.co.uk
The main problem with BASIC back then was that it wasn't compiled code - compiled BASIC would have been all right. 8 bit micros had interpreted BASIC which was the problem.