PC game dossier
If we use PC to mean the IBM PC family, DONKEY.BAS is the name that quickly comes up. Not because it was the first computer game ever, but because it shipped early in the PC DOS world and showed that the new business machine could also play.
This dossier deliberately uses the IBM PC as the boundary. That makes the question smaller, fairer and more useful for GamingPlanet: this is not the whole history of computer games, but the start of the PC as a game platform.
For GamingPlanet, DONKEY.BAS is the best candidate for the first game on the IBM PC. It appeared as a BASIC program on early PC DOS disks and ran in the new IBM PC environment.
If you define the question more strictly as a commercial game, Microsoft Adventure becomes a stronger candidate. It was not a small BASIC sample, but a full text adventure that became an important early IBM PC release.
The word PC is the problem. If you mean any personal computer, systems such as the Apple II, TRS-80 and other home computers already had games before 1981. If you mean any computer game, the story goes back even further, to universities, minicomputers and experiments such as Spacewar! on the PDP-1.
But in everyday use, many people use PC to mean the line that started with the IBM PC and later IBM-compatible machines. Within that boundary, the story becomes clearer.
DONKEY.BAS was small, simple and honestly not a masterpiece. You drove along a two-lane road and pressed the space bar to switch lanes and avoid an obstacle. That was nearly all of it.
The game was made at Microsoft by Neil Konzen and Bill Gates, as a demonstration of what BASIC on the IBM PC could do with color, input and sound.
That is exactly why it is interesting. It shows how approachable BASIC was: a user could not only play, but also inspect, change and understand the code. For game preservation, that is almost more charming than a closed executable.
Microsoft Adventure deserves a place next to DONKEY.BAS. Where DONKEY.BAS was mainly a bundled BASIC sample, Microsoft Adventure feels more like a true early PC game: a text adventure, based on the older Colossal Cave tradition, released for the IBM PC in 1981.
So the cleanest conclusion is not one hard winner, but two answers: DONKEY.BAS as an early bundled IBM PC game, and Microsoft Adventure as a strong candidate if you mainly mean commercial releases.
The first PC games did not always exist as neat boxes with screenshots on the back. Sometimes they were a line in a directory, a BASIC file, a floppy or a manual explaining what the machine could do.
That makes early PC game history harder to collect, but also more interesting. The game itself matters, but so do the medium, documentation, context and hardware that once made it feel normal.
Also visit the Retro PC games and PC big boxes hub, the Game Preservation & Digital Game Ownership dossier and the guide How to play and preserve old PC games on Windows 11.
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