Game testers wanted 2015

Cover to Cover Adventure International Spring 1981 Catalog pp 27 28

Our coverage of the Spring 1981 Adventure International catalog continues, with page 27 dedicated to the companys first published game for Radio Shacks intriguing new 6809-based Color Computer.  Venerable TRS-80 programmer Lance Micklus was one of the first out of the gate with this collection of simple games for the CoCo:


Computer Mouse is clearly yet another version of Robots, a.k.a. Daleks, the robot-collision game that inspired the faster-paced arcade game Berzerk.  Micklus continued to use the "Computer Mouse" character -- before the term "mouse" came to mean a specific input device -- in several other projects over the years, and a version of it graces his website if you want to see what hes up to these days.  Pillbox is the classic aim-and-launch military game that made the rounds of all the early platforms, Ziphoyd Pinball is a version of the non-flipper pinball games, more recognizable today as pachinko, where a ball was sent up to rattle down through a field of pins into scoring pockets.  And you can guess what classic game concept Blockout borrowed from.


Next we have a brief interruption from another computer software publisher whose contemporaneous catalog we paged through a while back -- Acorn Software Products, Inc.  In the home computing industrys early years, the hobby wasnt yet big enough to sustain newsstand magazines, so one place for early publishers to advertise was in each others catalogs.  Acorn anted up to buy two pages in the Adventure International catalog, and here is the first, on page 28:



Next weekend, well wrap up this catalog if all goes as planned.