Recently I played Genma Taisen, published by Pony Canyon in Japan in March 1983 to coincide with the accompanying film. It was an official conversion of an animated film to a game; the “first…

In questa intervista esclusiva, Bert Reiner, uno dei protagonisti della storia di Coleco Industries, ripercorre il cammino dell’azienda dagli anni pionieristici del Telstar, al successo internazionale...

Most soap operas take a while to work their way up to murder, but EastEnders kicks off with it from the very first scene, airing February 1985 on BBC One. A door gets kicked in; the characters Arth…

I’ve finished the game; I was nearly at the end. My previous posts are needed for context. I had left off on an apparent combination lock with four symbols, where you had to enter an “i…

(Continued from my last post.) Eye of Min, as I previously mentioned, was part of a trilogy, the second and third games being The Sabre of Sultar and The Temple of Azragor respectively. They were o…

In the 1960s, Qantas wanted to improve their flight reservation system. At the time, reservation clerks would get tickertapes from travel agents and enter flights manually; every single sales offic…

I owned an Acorn Electron as a kid. It wasn’t the greatest games machine in the playground, but it did have the best game of all-time, Braben and Bell’s Elite, and one of the finest adventure games…

(Continued from my previous posts.) Last time I left off on a narrow fissure leading to Watersmeet, and a cave nearby that’s a maze. Also, just for the record, I had a brass key (from the ver…

(Continued from my previous posts.) I have the first two underground sections (the one from the locked grate, and the one from the cave at the trail) mostly mapped out and connected, so now seems l…

(Continued from my previous post, read that post first before this one.) As is usual for one of these massive games of this era, the best place to start is outside. I’ll be showing it off in …

It’s not your world. You arrive there and you’re a person, a creature, just like all the others. You see something shiny and think maybe you could go get it, so off you wander. You’re not controlli…

Contest deadlines, international reviews, and some Ramsberg groveling lead our news coverage for text adventure enthusiasts this month. Tim, Jason, and Nick bring you the latest for one of the oldest ...

(Continued from my previous post about what is likely the first adventure game written in Sweden on a home computer.) I may not have squeezed out every single piece of working game from The Temple,…

What would you think is the first ‘personal computer’? I’m sure a lot of folks would say the Apple II, or at least would suggest Apple as having created a very early computer. May…

The last time this blog visited Sweden was with Stuga a full 15 years ago; one day, I will go back to that game and toss in the history of Swedish mainframes and academic computing alongside. Howev…

Weird and wonderful early consoles. Let’s talk about them.

(Continued from my previous post.) First, a resolution of the technical mystery with the caps-swap, courtesy of Andrea Pachetti in the comments (who has a blog dedicated to the history of Italian v…

In 1980, Commodore got their first factory in Germany (in Braunschweig). The CEO Jack Tramiel came to give a speech and was warned “don’t tell them you’re Jewish”. He handle…

(Continued from my part 1, read that part first.) Before tangling into the gameplay, one bit of bookkeeping and one bit of meta-discussion. For the bookkeeping, one thing I didn’t linger on i…

This is one of the most infamous computer games from Japan ever made. You can mostly blame the 1967 film The Graduate. I’ll explain along the way– Genma Taisen, the manga, was first ser…

Jeremiah McCall

People are going to buy these things and then after six weeks or so they’re going to put them up on a shelf in their closet and ignore them … we saw that there was a need for something …

【重要なお知らせ】 このたび文部科学省様のアカウントから告知がありました。特定非営利活動法人ゲーム保存協会は「未管理著作物裁定制度」の第二号として裁定を受けました。当制度ではSNSでも話題になっておりましたので、ご存じの方もいらっしゃるかと思います。 復刻対象となるゲームは『重機動戦隊シグナス』（日本ソフトアンドハード社） PC-88版です。現在、ダウンロード形式での配信に向けて準備を進めている...

Dr. Bongo’s plan is to destroy the World, with only hours before his devastating missiles are launched you locate his position. Your mission is to stop him and be the World’s No. 1 hero…

As a child I was obsessed with making stuff, it started with cardboard boxes and moved on to wood by the age of 5. By 10 I was constantly visiting rubbish dumps to find broken electrical stuff I co…

I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my previous post. Just to get it out of the way first, we’ve got headhunters again, something I’ve written about before. Since this …

The final March 1981 release, Tennis, is another sports game from the folks at Activision, which drew attention with titles like Boxing, Skiing and...

It’s been a while since we’ve played Peter Kirsch, despite this being his 16th game for this blog. (Most recently: The Dalton Gang, Alaskan Adventure, The Curse of the Pharoah) This is …

It was remembered as a “joke” computer, with its 22 by 23 character screen and 3.5Kb of RAM. Revisionists forgot that at the time there was nothing else, and that within the confines of…

(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, and in particular my last post which described how the 1981 PET version of the game was recently rescued.) Catacombs was more frustrating to get to t…

(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, which you probably should read before this one if you want the full background.) Last weekend, I received a message from Marcel Ingram Lansing that o…

Back already! (Continued from my previous posts on Thissala.) Well. Rob pointed out I still missed a chunk of content, but I still would have made it an addendum or a comment on my last post, excep…

This is my last post on Thissala for now, although given the authors never finished it, and there seems to be content I haven’t been able to access, I can’t promise it is the last word.…

(Continued from my previous posts.) I’ve finally finished filling in the map of the desert, and found absolutely no items whatsoever. It’s all just rooms and more rooms. If there are an…

(Continued from my previous posts.) One thing to keep in mind with mainframe adventure games is they were often experienced by players of that period in a state of “under construction”.…

(Continued from my previous posts.) Last time I left off on getting immediately killed by a pirate when entering a niche at the train station. Predictably, you can also get killed by waiting for th…