Quite frankly, Mario is stunned — just stunned — by that potted plant.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Tell us about your most novel experience with Mario Paint. Did you make any music or animations?

Every once and a while, I receive emails from people looking for a certain game, electronic toy, or computer from their distant past. I then pass it on to intrepid VC&G readers to crack the case.

The Clues

Richard writes:

My father’s birthday is fast approaching, and I want to find him one of his classic games from the Commodore 64. Unfortunately, the name has been lost in time and his fuzzy memory, though the details of it remain. He often remarks about the amazing depth given to characters in the game.

The plot was a mystery of some sort, set in various Bulletin Board Systems. Some clues would be several messages back in the board, and various NPCs would post messages to the board at key points in the story. When connecting to a board, it would slide in from right to left, and then wobble slightly as it stabilized. Apparently the game itself was very well built, apparently having rather good word recognition, allowing for normal-ish conversations.

Beyond that, I know very little about the game. Hopefully the you can help me out, I’d really like to see this game for myself, and I’m sure it would bring him a great deal of joy. Hopefully what I have will be enough.

Thanks for any help,
Richard

The Search Begins

It’s up to you to find the object of Richard’s fuzzy memory. Post any thoughts or suggestions in the comments section below. Richard will be monitoring the comments, so if you need to clarify something with him, ask away. Good luck!

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Have a memory of a computer, video game, computer software, or electronic toy you need help identifying? Send me an email describing your memories in detail. Hopefully, the collective genius of the VC&G readership can help solve your mystery.

The Chessmaster (1916-1997)

This iconic wizened head loomed large over my childhood. It is the image of the Chessmaster, a fictional chess opponent who stars in a software series of the same name.

That series began way back in 1986 with The Chessmaster 2000, a comprehensive chess simulator that first appeared on 8-bit computer platforms like the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore 64. Published by The Software Toolworks, it spawned a series of at least 16 titles that quickly became the best-selling chess software franchise of all time.

My older brother always loved chess games, so I saw that aged face — a perennial feature of Chessmaster box art — many times throughout the 1980s and 1990s. I always wondered: who was the Chessmaster, really? Who was the real man behind that wise old face? Was he really that old or was he just wearing a wig?

Fast forward to 2006. Thinking I’d write about it on this blog, I emailed Ubisoft (the current publisher of The Chessmaster series) and asked them if they knew who portrayed the Chessmaster. Of course, they had no idea — institutional memory is sorely lacking in most tech companies, and it’s even worse in the software industry. Today I know better than to even bother asking.

Instead of tracking down everyone who worked on Chessmaster 2000 and interrogating them (although I considered it), I figured I’d bide my time and put the somewhat trivial issue on the back burner. The Internet has a way of consuming information and making it available to everyone online, so I thought the answer would pop up one day.

It did.

[ Continue reading The Chessmaster Died in 1997 » ]

World Series Baseball 98 for the Sega Saturn

I’ve written about gratuitous and graphic video game advertising of the 1990s more than a few times over the years, but I never get tired of revisiting this wildly bombastic era in consumer marketing.

Here we see a nice ad for World Series Baseball 98 for the Sega Saturn, complete with front-and-center forearm scrape. I don’t know about you, but this makes me want to play baseball. Injury sells.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Would a graphic ad like this make you more or less likely to play a certain video game?

Gaming fun in the palm of your gigantic hand.

For me personally, the Super Game Boy (1994) was one of the most exciting video game peripherals ever released. It liberated Game Boy games from that unit’s blurry, dark screen, opening up a whole new world of gaming to those who preferred gaming on a TV set.

The fact that it also included a remake / extension of Donkey Kong, one of my favorite games of olde, made it a must-buy. I still remember the day I got it — my family drove to a local shopping mall, and I decided to stay in the car playing Donkey Kong on the Game Boy (even though not in color) instead of going inside. I haven’t been that excited about a new game in a long time.

(By the way, I first talked about the Super Game Boy in an early Retro Scan way back in March 2006.)

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first get a Super Game Boy? Did you have any Super Game Boy enhanced games for it?

Thirty years ago, Commodore Business Machines released the Commodore 64, an 8-bit home computer that served up early computer experiences for millions of users around the world. By some estimates, the little brown wonder sold as many as 17 million units during its 12 year lifespan, which means there are a lot of C64 fans out there.

In honor of both the machine and its fans, I recently locked myself in a room with the vintage machine for a week to put it through its paces and see if I could use it as a work machine. In the process, I tested it as a word processor, game console, and even used it to send a few tweets. I did it all with vintage hardware and software, so you’ll find no Ethernet adapters or SD card drives here.

If, while reading, you feel anything is missing, that’s because my article got quite a chopping — I did so much in my week with the C64 that the full report on my activities was way too long for publication. For example, sections on GEOS, my pirated disk collection, and more were dropped. Perhaps those will show up somewhere else in the future.

Still, the result should be quite a fun read for any vintage computing fan. I hope you enjoy it.

Cartridges, cartridges, cartridges.

I found this Electronics Boutique flyer in my old files recently. It measures about 5.5″ by 8.5″ in size. Sometimes I’m glad I save everything, and other times, well…ask my wife.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the worst deal you’ve ever received when trading in used games?

Virtual Boy: Eating Mario’s face since 1995. (Artwork © David Julian)

[Update (03/05/2018): The illustrator of this image contacted me via email and asked me to add a copyright credit. His name is David Julian, and you can see more of his work on his personal website.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever felt sick while playing a video game in 3D?

Frozen whipped gelatin on a stick.

I recently found this cardboard tip sheet for Crystalis in a pile of my old stuff at my parents’ house. As you can see, I cut it out of a JELLO Gelatin Pops box in or around 1990.

The tip sheet seems to serve a triple marketing purpose: 1) to promote NES games (specifically Crystalis, in this case), 2) to promote the 1990 Nintendo World Championships, and 3) to promote Nintendo Power magazine.

I love finding tie-in marketing artifacts like this — I’m glad I saved it all those years ago.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you remember cutting video game tips out of boxes, magazines, or other paper publications? Tell us about it.

Electronic Arts turned 30 on May 28th, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to check in with its founder, Trip Hawkins, on how he feels about Electronic Arts today. It’s no secret that EA, while a massively successful company, takes a lot of heat from gamers on a number of issues (see this Retro Scan and its comments for more on that).

In an interview published at Edge Online, Hawkins and I spoke at length about Electronic Arts, including the founding of EA, finding early EA developers, his time at Apple, his friendship with Steve Jobs, and yes, how he feels about Electronic Arts today.

The resulting interview was so long that Edge decided to split it into five parts. It just published the last part today, so I thought I’d collect all the links here so you can read it.

Interestingly, there has been no mention of the company’s 30th anniversary from Electronic Arts itself. Its staff was probably too busy revising its own history to notice.