Croquet Capers

Croquet Capers was the first computer game produced by Nick and Ted Phillips to be programmed in the BASIC language, kicking off the BASIC Era. It was the only known game to be released by their company Nick and Ted's Excellent Game. The majority of the game logic was written on June 21, 1997, by Bill Como. It was distributed online during early 1999.

The game is loosely based on the rules of the sport croquet. Players control the ball directly, rather than using a mallet. They must move the ball through all wickets on a stage and finish by hitting the center peg. Crashing once or hitting the center peg early results in a game over, forcing players to restart the stage. Upon completing a stage, players were simply presented with a new stage; thus, the game could be played forever.

On June 21, 1997, Nick and Ted attended John Como's high school graduation party at the Como residence, where other attendees were playing a sport called croquet. After playing for a while, Ted was dismayed that he would not be able to play at home. After a discussion with Bill Como, they collaborated on an early build of Croquet Capers for Ted to play a computerized version at home.

Bill Como wrote the game logic using the BASIC computer language, providing Ted and Nick copies of the compiler and the game code on floppy disk. Over the next several months, they tweaked the game further before distributing it locally via floppy disk.

In early 1999, Ted's Fun Site began distributing Croquet Capers. The site originally planned to allow visitors to play the game in an embedded player in their web browser, but most visitors' browsers automatically downloaded the game instead.

It is unclear how many playable copies of the game survive to the day. Due to deterioration of the floppy disk medium over the decades, copies in the corporate archive were unplayable for years until February 2024, when various surviving copies were compared and merged and repairs were made to other sections of corrupted code.