Category: Retro gaming

I just love everything and anything Indy…and I love Lucasfilm..
I played both the action and adventure games released by Lucasfilm in the late 80’s and early 90’s, the action game wasn’t really my cup of tea but the adventures were really something else. I have really fond memories of The Last Crusade, The Adventure Game, loved the location and the puzzles, it was very true to the movie of the same name.
I played it originally in all it’s EGA glory, which looked absolutely fantastic. I later on played the VGA version, which didn’t leave a strong visual impression.

Fate of the Atlantis
One of my favourite adventure games has to be Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Fate of Atlantis was the sequel to the 1989 adventure game Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, both developed by Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts. Atlantis was met with critical acclaim when released in 1992 and it sold well over one million units (on all platforms which it was released for).
In 1993 an enhanced “talkie” edition with full voice acting and digitized sound effects was release on CD.
The story was written by Hal Barwood and the designer Noah Falstein, who had rejected the original plan to base it on Indiana Jones and the Monkey King/Garden of Life, a rejected script written by Chris Columbus for the third movie.

Below is some of my sealed Indiana Jones games.

Founded in November 1984 by Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, who both previously had co-founded Activision in October 1979, alongside David Crane, Jim Levy and Richard Muchmore.
Accolade developed and published a large array of games for the most popular home computers of the 80’s (and consoles), titles like Test Drive and Hard Ball, both which ended up as two of Accolades longest running franchises.
By the mid-90s most of Accolade’s published games was developed by third-party developers, sales we declining and many of the published titles were perceived to be indistinguishing and lacking polish.
One franchise which saw a huge success in the later part of the 90’s was Test Drive, with Test Drive 4,5 and 6 seeing sales in the millions. In 1999 Accolade was bought by Infogrames which name later was changed to Atari, the same name of the company both founders worked at, before founding Activision in the late 70’s.

Copy cats?
Everybody loves Larry Laffer, right?.  While Sierra had great success with their adventure games and especially the Leisure Suit Larry franchise in the late 80’s and early 90’s it could look like that success might have been the driving force behind Accolade’s development of their own geeky and nerdy protagonist Les Manley, which would be featured in two games Les Manley in Search for the King released in 1990 and Les Manley in Lost in L.A, released the year after in 1991.

I played both games in the early and mid 90’s and actually, in a funky and strange kinda way, like both of them.
Les Manley in Search for the King had some really bad design decision, crazy puzzles and a text parser that showed absolutely no mercy but nonetheless it was quite fun at places – and really challenging.
The first point and click adventure games with VGA color graphics would arrive around the same time as the first Les Manley game and with its sub-par parser the game already felt a bit dated when released.

The graphics were great and the music accompanied the game and settings very well.
Accolade dropped the text parser for a more modern point and click interface in the sequel which made the game more enjoyable. Lost in L.A. featured 256 color VGA graphics and looked really great at the time.

Both Les Manley games were only received with mediocre reviews, but they do have a following to this day and they have become pretty collectable – I really like the two titles both as games and as items I treasure in my collection.

– I really do like Accolade’s EGA graphics in the late 80’s, it was very distinguished and bright.

Fast and hot
In 1987 the original Test Drive was developed by canadian software developer Distinctive Software Inc., who developed a few of Accolades hit in the late 80’s.
Test Drive featured five of the hottest supercars the 80’s had to offer, cars like the Lamborghini Countach, the Ferrari Testarossa and the Porsche 911 Turbo.

The code base for 1987’s Test Drive was also used for Test Drive II: The Duel and 1988’s Grand Prix Circuit. I played both games a lot as a kid, Grand Prix Circuit on our IBM/PC at home with it’s CGA Graphics and PC-Speaker and Test Drive on a friends Commodore 64.

Reverse console engineering
In 1991, Accolade was served with a lawsuit, from Sega, regarding copyright infringement, that eventually would lead to the concept of reverse engineering for interoperability purposes. Sega wanted all its Genesis console titles to be exclusive to Sega. Unwilling to conform to single platform games, Accolade engineers reverse engineered the Genesis and created their own development systems. Sega sued Accolade over the practice and won an initial injunction, forcing Accolade to remove all Genesis product from store shelves. Accolade, however, won on appeal and reached an out of court settlement with Sega that allowed Accolade to continue building their own Genesis cartridges, but as an official licensee.

Here we haved my sealed Accolade collection.

Electronic Arts original US small box releases, 1988-1991.

Founded by Trip Hawkins, a former Apple employee, in 1982.
After 4 years of publishing and releasing in the LP folio style format, Electronic Arts changed to the more common small box format, used by most other publishers at the time.
This didn’t mean they moved away from their very cool way of honouring the developers as artists and “superstars”, which were a big part of the folio-design on the earlier releases, this idea was very much kept throughout the small box years, showing both pictures and telling about the developers.

A great time
I played most of the small box games in the late eighties and early nineties, some were played on our IBM/PC we had at home, some were played on friends C64’s and Amiga’s, but no matter the platform these games were absolutely great and for me really defines an era in my gaming life. I might go out on a limb here but I personally don’t think EA published one bad game in a small box – a really big feat when we take a look at how different most of these games are from each other, ranging from action, sports, RPG, Simulations, fighting and strategy – and when we look at how fierce the competition was at the time.

Legends never dies
Madden NFL which is widely popular today saw it’s beginning in this era, with the very first Madden game, John Madden Football released in 1988 (partly developed by Bethesda Softworks). Since its first release Electronic Arts has sold more than 100 million copies of Madden NFL.Earl Weaver Baseball, which spawned a few sequels, were a smash hit in 1987 and alongside John Madden Football really helped pave the way for the EA Sports brand which were launched in 1991-92. We all know EA Sports today for titles like NBA Live, NHL, Madden NFL, FIFA and Nascar.

Wasteland the grand farther of futuristic post apocalyptic RPG’s, developed by Interplay and published by Electronic Arts, became the basis of the original Fallout game, which is still spawning sequels to this day.

Wasteland saw a sequel in 2014 with inXile Entertainments succesful Wasteland 2 kickstarter campaign. InXile was formed in 2002 by Interplay founder Brian Fargo and has most of the original Wasteland crew on board.

Modem Wars, the first multi-computer online game, Modem Wars was played over a modem connection between two machines (via telephone or null modem serial connection). Features such as fog of war, varied unit types, terrain, and formations, all now standards in the genre, were implemented despite the daunting technical limitations of late 1980s computers. 

Dynamix. Before Dynamix started to publish their own titles, and before they were bought by Sierra On-Line, they developed a great array of titles in the mid to late eighties some of these titles were published by Electronic Arts – titles like Skyfox, Caveman Ugh-Lympics, Abrams Battle Tank and, in my opinion one of best games for the C64, Project Firestart, developed at Dynamix and designed by Jeff Tunnel and Damon Slye. Project Firestart was released by Electronic Arts in 1989

Starflight has been widely praised by both contemporary and modern critics, and is one of the earliest instances of a sandbox game. It led to the development of a sequel, Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, and influenced the design of numerous other games for decades after its first release.

Here we have my Electronic Arts small box collection for the various platforms I used to play these fine gems on back in the days.

Here we have my sealed Maxis collection, while most of these items have been in my collection for over a decade, I did have the chance to obtain of few signed items from a former Maxis employee, last year – These items were given to the development team, who all signed them, they got numbered  and then they went on and got shrink-wrapped.

I don’t collect anything much newer than 1994, unless of course it was something I played myself, so no Sims etc.

Here we have my sealed copies of The Black Cauldron.
The copy on the right (in the gallery below) was designer Al Lowe’s personal copy (also signed by him).

The movie was released in 1985 by Walt Disney Pictures and the year after the game, with the same name and designed by Al Lowe and Roberta Williams, was published by Sierra On-Line.
Along with The Dark Crystal it remains one of only a few adventure games by Sierra to be based on films.

To make the game more accessable for kids and a-like the classic text parser was removed and instead used the function keys to perform various actions.

Access Software, Inc. founded in 1982 by Bruce Carver. (more to come).