Developed by Al Lowe in 1982 and published by Sierra On-Line in 1983, Bop-A-Bet is an educational computer game, which teaches letter recognition and alphabetization. Unlike most Sierra titles from the period, Bop-A-Bet was only released for the Apple II platform.

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Bop-A-Bet released in 1983 and only for the Apple II

Al and his partner Mike MacChesney, which were from the same neighborhood and both worked at local schools, started Sunnyside Software, where they developed educational games for the Apple II platform. Al was the head of programming, Mike was the one working with the graphics, and both of their wives, Margaret,and Rae Lynn worked on ideas for the games.
-The four names are all on the cover in the lower left-hand corner of the cover.

Sunnyside Soft developed three Apple II titles, Dragon’s Keep, Troll’s Tale and Bop-A-Bet. Ken and Roberta Williams of Sierra On-Line liked the games and how they looked and got the rights to publish them in 1983.
As we all probably know Al Lowe started working at Sierra On-Line and had great success with the Leisure Suit Larry series, Sierra’s Disney adventure The Black Cauldron and of course later on Freddy Pharkas (just to name a few). Al Ended up working for Sierra for 16 years.

I might be opening up a can of worms here but to my experience, this is probably one of the rarest boxed Sierra On-Line games. In my 20 years of serious collecting, this is the only example I have seen, besides the copy, The National Museum of Play has in their collection.
Not a lot of info nor pictures to be found online.

Many would probably argue that Ultima Escape from Mt. Drash is rarer, in my opinion, I don’t think that’s actually the case, I’ve seen 6-7 copies of Mt. Drash…. but the story of Mt. Drash is of course way more exciting and fascinating and the fact it has Ultima in its title is enough to make it importing -even thou it has nothing to do with Richard Garriot (he did give his acceptance for Sierra to use the name) or the Ultima series in any other way. Sierra On-Line wanted to benefit from the Ultima brand name, which makes a lot of sense from a business point of view.

This copy was Al’s personal copy and obtained by me last year, the item is signed and is one of my absolute favorites in my Sierra Collection.

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