1985 - An Overview Of Stuff

Let us go then, you and I, on a trip back in time. Twenty-eight years back in time, to be precise...

The home computer market as it was then was a very different place to what it is today. For one thing, there wasn't the same degree of blanket media coverage of new games and systems, no blogs or game sites to scrutinise every forthcoming release in obsessive detail. All of this makes the job of establishing when certain games were actually released extremely difficult. In the case of the ST, the details of what software was actually available to buy in the first six months of it's life are somewhat hazy.

In researching this blog, I've relied on contemporaneous magazine articles and reviews to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, and basically what I've learnt from this is that coverage of the ST and Amiga didn't really begin in earnest until the following year, which is obviously not terribly helpful. Confusing matters further is the fact that the information compiled on sites such as MobyGames and The Little Green Desktop is often highly unreliable, at least in terms of nailing things down to specific dates. They do, however, provide a place to start.

So working out what games did come out in '85 has essentially been a process of elimination, by establishing all the titles that didn't come out that year and crossing them off the list. After removing all the games that I've been able to ascertain with some certainty have been incorrectly dated on the aforementioned sites, here is the list as it stands:

Game	Release Date	Publisher	Developer
Cutthroats		Activision	Infocom
Deadline		Activision	Infocom
Enchanter		Activision	Infocom
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy		Activision	Infocom
Infidel		Activision	Infocom
The Lands Of Havoc	July	Microdeal	Steve Bak
The Lost Kingdom Of Zkull		Talent Computer Systems
Mudpies	December	Microdeal(UK), Michtron(US)
Planetfall		Activision	Infocom
Seastalker		Activision	Infocom
Sorcerer		Activision	Infocom
Starcross		Activision	Infocom
Suspect		Activision	Infocom
Suspended		Activision	Infocom
The Witness		Activision	Infocom
Zork: The Great Underground Empire		Activision	Infocom
Zork II: The Wizard Of Frobozz		Activision	Infocom
Zork III: The Dungeon Master		Activision	Infocom

So it seems from this that if you were an early ST adopter, you would've been pretty much just playing Infocom text adventures for the first six months or so. This makes sense, as Infocom already had a large catalogue of games that all ran on the same interpreter, and thus would've been very easy to port over.

Other than that, there wasn't a whole lot else - most games companies were either hard at work developing software for the new systems, or biding their time before nailing their flag to either the ST or Amiga mast. As far as I've been able to tell, the only other games to emerge in the latter half of 1985 were Lost Kingdom Of Zkull(another text adventure), Mudpies(an arcade game inspired by Robotron) and Lands Of Havoc(a multi-screen arcade adventure game). The latter is what we shall be looking at first, as it happens to be the very first ST game actually released.