I don’t know about the Amiga, but the C64, Atari, and TI computers of the era either booted into a BASIC prompt or you could get there with one or two key presses. Many of us spent a lot of our youth making games and sharing them with our friends.
Agreed with your overall point, but I have to mention that out-of-the-box C64 BASIC was so crippled, most game related I/O had to be done via POKE and PEEK, i.e. not really BASIC and as low level as it gets.
Nevertheless, it was my first programming language ever.
I don’t know about the Amiga, but the C64, Atari, and TI computers of the era either booted into a BASIC prompt or you could get there with one or two key presses. Many of us spent a lot of our youth making games and sharing them with our friends.