Rockets
A maths game Graeme wrote with his son Chris, aged 8, in 1995, in QBasic. Sums rise up the screen – type the answer before they reach the top.
Want something harder? Try Rockets 2 – a modern tribute with times tables, big numbers, hexadecimal and binary.
How to play
- Type your name, choose what to practise, then the biggest number you want to use (2–9) and a speed (1–10).
- Type the answer to each sum one digit at a time – for 12, type 1 then 2. It won’t show on the screen, just as it didn’t in 1995.
- Every 10 right answers the sums rise faster. Ten wrong answers (or sums that reach the top) and the game is over.
- Your best score for each kind of sum is remembered on this device.
The original
The first version, with adding only, follows the original program line by line, typed up from the printouts. Read the original code.
Later, Graeme and Chris made a new version where you could choose subtraction, multiplication, division or a mix from a menu at the start. Its code hasn’t survived, so those options have been rebuilt to work the same way.