Friday 12 April 2013

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:


GameRelease DatePublisherDeveloper
Cutthroats
ActivisionInfocom
Deadline
ActivisionInfocom
Enchanter
ActivisionInfocom
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
ActivisionInfocom
Infidel
ActivisionInfocom
The Lands Of HavocJulyMicrodealSteve Bak
The Lost Kingdom Of Zkull
Talent Computer Systems
MudpiesDecemberMicrodeal(UK), Michtron(US)
Planetfall
ActivisionInfocom
Seastalker
ActivisionInfocom
Sorcerer
ActivisionInfocom
Starcross
ActivisionInfocom
Suspect
ActivisionInfocom
Suspended
ActivisionInfocom
The Witness
ActivisionInfocom
Zork: The Great Underground Empire
ActivisionInfocom
Zork II: The Wizard Of Frobozz
ActivisionInfocom
Zork III: The Dungeon Master
ActivisionInfocom


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.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you very much for teaching me the correct usage of the word contemporaneous. Most appreciated. :D

    I remember reading on atari-forum.com that you thought there were some discrepancies regarding Infocom release dates. Are these the games you were talking about? Or is this information correct to the best of your knowledge?

    I assume you have seen the database site at Atarimania... That may be of use here...

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  2. Yeah, those are the games I was talking about. The dates seems to be accurate as far as Infocom's publicity material of the time goes, so I'm going to stick with that unless I find something that suggests otherwise.

    As I've said, sites like Atarimania are useful as a starting point, but there's a lot of wrong information which gets included without being questioned. One good thing I'm hoping comes out of this silly project is that it ends up with a timeline of releases that's a little more accurate than the ones available at the moment.

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