I definitely did not originate the ANIMAL game notion. I probably mentioned that in my LispNYC talk recently, but also it's discussed as an incidental matter in a blog post from 2010 where I was reviewing Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget": https://web.archive.org/web/20131102031307/http://open.salon...
TL;DR I learned to program in a world almost devoid of computers, but we had occasional magazines and books that talked about what computers would do and I saw mention of an ANIMAL program and thought it'd be fun to write one. My first attempt was in BASIC, and the difficulties I had primed me to like Lisp when it came along. A long series of implementations resulted from that, and there's a Lisp origin story for me that you should see the LispNYC talk to get in fuller form, but it was important to me in how I ended up a Lisper at all.
Is that that database game where you have to think of an animal, and the computer asks you yes/no questions to guess it? I played around with such a thing on 8 bit micros.
