Wayne A. Lee, a VC&G reader, recently wrote me about an odd game title that has been haunting him for years.

It was [your Retro Scan of the Week column] that brought to mind an ad I saw way back in the 80s in Compute! magazine for a Commodore 64 game called “Babies of the Dirt.” I’d never seen the game itself, but the game’s bizarre title has remained stuck in my head for decades. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the game was never released, but a few years ago I found the ad, and I scanned it (it’s from the December 1983 issue of Compute!).

Do you know anything about Entech, or this game? I wonder if any of your readers would. Googling the exact phrase “Babies of the Dirt” turns up nothing, and no one I’ve ever asked has ever heard of it.

Unfortunately, I know nothing about either Entech or the mysterious Babies of the Dirt for the Commodore 64, but the game sure sounds dramatic. Here’s the description from the ad:

An earthquake sucks you to the center of the earth. To escape you must battle the BABIES OF THE DIRT. But, don’t miss or its doomsday! Watch out for their mother.

You have to admit that Babies in the Dirt serves as a very compelling title. I’d love to see the game in action — if, in fact, it ever existed. It probably reached prototype form but never went on sale. Coming from what was likely a one-programmer software company at the time, such scenarios of “lost” computer games are not unusual these days.

Entech appears to have been one of many hundreds of indie home computer game developers in the early 1980s. Ads for similar software houses littered the pages of home computer magazines like Compute! at the time. I don’t have the December ’83 issue of Compute!, so I couldn’t find the ad for Babies myself. I did look through the October and November 1983 issues of Compute!, but I found no other ads for Entech. It makes sense — this one ad probably blew their whole advertising budget for a year.

Does anybody out there know anything about Entech, a southern California software company, or Babies of the Dirt? If so, please leave a comment below. Perhaps the programmer of Babies will step forward some day to claim responsibility for this bizarre title. Until then, we’ll probably still be in the dark.

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UPDATE (11/27/2007): I’ve been scanning through more issues of Compute! magazine and I found this ad in the June 1983 issue which mentions Babies of the Dirt. The ad’s design is similar to the one above, leading me to believe that the ads were designed by the same local company (A-V Graphics). However, the company listed in this ad, “House of Software,” sells products by companies other than Entech. Interestingly, House of Software was located near Entech (in/around Los Angeles, CA), so perhaps House of Software was run by a friend/relative of Entech, or perhaps even by the same person behind Entech.

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