i'm happy to report that someone had already digitized the Fantasy Gamer's package a few years ago! you can play it online here and generate your own little dungeons. the room generator is pretty cute:
what was missing, however, was the 40+ pages of print documentation that came in the mail-order ziplock, and a pic of the cassette tape. i've scanned them all here, along with a new recording of the cassette:
one of those fascinating things learned only by manual archival of materials:
Prickly-Pear Software recorded two exact copies of the program on a single 5-minute tape. the idea, i imagine, was to provide a second identical copy in case the tape became physically damaged (or mis-recorded during fabrication)
more hilariously good TRS-80 software from the archive
Bedlam puts you in the role of a patient in a mental facility whose only goal is to escape
having worked in a psychiatric hospital in a previous life, i can confirm that (a) this is a rather uncharitable view of hospitals and their patients, and (b) 🤣
the answer/interpretive key for the mental health exam: classic!
i'm finally opening up boxes of software from my archive that haven't seen the light of day in 15-20 years. today, i found a program that has never been archived or probably seen in over 40 years.
i absolutely adore this dungeon mastering program for the TRS-80 that was distributed in ziplock bags in 1982
i can find only one mention of it on the web - the august 1982 issue of TRS-80 Rainbow magazine that advertises it for $19.95 + S&H
happily, i found the cassette, which has never been archived anywhere AFAIK. i am scanning in the printed documentation, along with making a recording of the tape.
when i was a kid, buying a new game was serious business. it meant saving up my weekly farm-chore allowances of $2.50 for six to eight months, before I could afford a brand new computer game. this usually meant about one new PC game a year, along with whatever I got for christmas.
among the lost pieces of canadian computing history are the retail prices for computer hardware and software we swallowed in the 1990s
buried in the archives was this Softwarehouse catalogue from 1994 - an Edmonton-based computer retailer from the 80s and 90s.
enjoy skimming through the eyeball-gouging prices we paid back then, like an $80 copy of Isaac Asimov's Science Adventure for DOS. this was mostly due to a crushing US-CAN exchange rate at the time.
ps: anyone else remember visiting Softwarehouse in YEG? it was at 102 ave and 108 st :D
to celebrate @SpindleyQ's upload of PaRappa iOS (see https://gamemaking.social/@SpindleyQ/112414210000096420), I am happy to contribute The Longest Journey HD for iOS. This has been missing from the app store for more than 6 years, and was recovered from a ten year old ipod touch I had sitting in my desk.
TLJ is easily in the top five adventure games of the past 25 years, and the iOS version is exceptional. it's an absolute shame that it was never ported to 64-bit.
this IPA runs on 32-bit iOS devices running iOS 7-10. sideloadable, or however you'd prefer to install it. grab it here:
today, some obscure sierra on-line & dynamix history that shouldn't be obscure yet is due to how gaming culture developed: Front Page Sports Baseball. this just came in the mail, and i'm so glad to finally have my own copy after playing a demo from a CD-ROM Today! magazine cover disc as a kid.
this dynamix-produced and sierra-published title is weird for a bunch of reasons.
first, it's one of the last few DOS-only games that came out in the mid-90s.
second, it runs in hi-res mode using what i suspect is a blend of software-rendered 3D and 2D sprites that were a holdover from dynamix's 3Space engine used in almost all of dynamix's titles. (pic 2) the animation is crisp, the sprites are beautifully rendered in a very compressed colour palette.
third, the Front Page Sports series were massive hits - outselling other sierra/dynamix titles of the time. but no one talks about it, because sports games often get irritated yawns from gamers.
fourth, this game is fun to play. it's not just an average EA sports-style title. the batting/pitching gameplay is addictive, and the simulation of the players and teams is deep.
and finally, there is - unbelievably - still an active FPS Baseball community still modding and developing rosters for the game. someone maintains a tool that generates websites that lets other people see the outcomes of your baseball games like a late-90s ESPN network site 🤣 https://www.silverbox.com/biorhythm/
The Entertainment Software Association (the lobbying organization that represents video game publishers) doesn't just not care about video game preservation, but actively fights against efforts to preserve games, even games not owned by their member companies. They were at the US Library of Congress fighting a copyright exemption for out of print games to be made available by libraries.
Ich frage mich, ob es irgendwann zu einem zweiten #VideogameCrash kommen wird. Mit der momentanen Praktik gewisser Unternehmen, muss man sich ja inzwischen die Frage stellen, ob man überhaupt noch #Videospiele kaufen sollte, wenn man sie am Ende eh nicht besitzt und das dem Boomer Gesetzgebern scheinbar egal ist.
normal saturday night things now include browsing Snood's 2006 web store and imagining all of the great snoodwear i should have owned in grad school @davedobson
i’m going through some of my Origin Systems boxes and found this treasure - it is the install guide for the Wing Commander: Secret Missions 2 addon.
if you’ve played the original game, you might already know that there are “winning” and “losing” progression paths based on your performance during missions. this was meant to advance the storyline towards either a terran or kilrathi victory.
this unfortunately meant that you would miss out on winning/losing path-specific missions, unless you played the entire game over and lost (won) on purpose.
the mission pack apparently has a fantastic character import utility that lets you unlock all missions in WC, without having to play them over. i wish I had known about this when I was a kid!
Posting for visibility. Anyone from abroad (not the US for actually insane reasons) has a chance to use legal routes to prevent online video games from dying starting with The Crew from Ubisoft.
Killing a game is pretty much my number one pet peeve. Borderline cardinal sin levels of maliciousness.
[1/2] had some fun with some obscure video game history this morning
if you grew up playing Ultima, Crusader or Wing Commander, you might recognize the name.
recorded almost nowhere is the location of Origin Systems' building during its peak productive phase in the late 80s/early 90s. there was a single mention of a road in Shay Addams' The Official Book of Ultima which led to some cross-referencing in corporate databases
so here it is: a mapped drive to Origin's sleek 1980s office building, as it stands today just outside of Austin, TX.
(now for rent if you need 20,000 sq ft of work space!)