Game Tester Gameloft

Cover to Cover Adventure International Spring 1981 Catalog pp 17 18

As we continue our nostalgic trip through the Spring 1981 Adventure International catalog, we encounter a number of long-forgotten products, but many of them have well-known descendants active in todays market.


Page 17 features more interpretations of classic early gaming concepts -- most of these ideas appeared on multiple platforms under multiple titles, and many continue to surface in todays casual and portable gaming market:


Stan Ockers Angle Worms / Crolon Diversion features the early competitive line-building game best known today from the movie TRONs light cycle sequence, as well as a space target game of some kind that the catalog copy cant be bothered to describe.  Richard Taylors Concentration is a version of the popular image-matching game -- somehow none of the computer game publishers were ever sued by the game shows producers, even though most of them appeared under the name Concentration; there may just have been too many to sue, as this is actually the second such game in the Scott Adams catalog, if we count the one packaged with Kid-Venture #2.  Scott Carpenters The Great Race adapts the traditional card game Mille Bornes, John Warshawers Poker Tournament is a player-vs.-CPU game of poker, and Musical Yat-C by Ricky H. Cates and Walter Fuller adds music and a trademark-skirting name change to the popular game of Yahtzee.  Jeff Jessees Mountain Shoot puts two opposing cannons on a randomly-generated landscape, using another early competitive game concept that eventually evolved into the long-running Worms series.

Page 18 presents one of the few non-entertainment products in the Adventure International lineup, the database system Maxi Manager:


The systems capabilities arent bad at all considering the hardware and diskette space available at the time -- while todays databases handily deal with millions of records of arbitrary size, this system was probably powerful enough to serve its customers well back in the day.  The feature comparison table is interesting -- all of the products listed are long gone, but either Maxi Manager was significantly ahead of the pack or the competition was carefully cherry-picked.  And I imagine the makers of AIDS III were rather relieved to be out of business in the mid-1980s.

Tomorrow, our historical trip continues...