I've been gaming since the days of Pong and still own a working Atari 2600. I tend to ramble on about retro games, whether they be board games, video games or PC games. Sometimes I digress. Decades after earning it, I'm finally putting the skills I learned while completing my history degree from the University of Victoria to good use. Or so I think. If you're into classic old school gaming, this blog is for you!
Got a game or product you want reviewed? Send me an email! Will review board games, PC games, video games and accessories (Xbox 360 or Wii, but also new releases for classic systems - you know who you are!)
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I've been buying a few Turbografx-16 games on eBay lately with varying levels of service. Surprised by how bad some "Top Rated Sellers" are. 2 days ago
At #wpwalk to help end global poverty. What's a little drizzle compared to what other people face every day? @WPWEdmonton1 week ago
Ever scoured the Internet looking for what exactly you were missing from the old board game you pulled from your closet, only to find no succor in your time of need? Well, stop that fruitless searching through endless google results, as this week we look at Parker Brothers’ Stop Thief, the classic 1979 Electronic Game of Cops and Robbers.
Box art for the 1979 game, Stop Thief
A more indepth discussion the various releases of this game through the years, as well as its gameplay, can by found in a previous blog entry, titled, The Best Classic Board Games – Stop Thief! What’s In That Game Box? deals specifically with the game’s contents, which are:
The game box (featuring a multi-colored Stop Thief logo, a prominent image of a hand holding the Electronic Crime Scanner, and a few cartoon detectives and criminals, all on a dull yellow/peach background)
The game board (featuring four multi-square building locations – Antiques, Bank, Furs, and Jewelry – five subway locations, the Newsstand location, and the 127-squared intersecting game path)
Four plastic Detective player tokens (blue, green, red, and yellow)
Two 6-sided dice
The Electronic Crime Scanner device (with a multicolored numeric keypad and requiring a “9-volt” battery to operate)
A supply of Reward Money (in green-colored $50; blue-colored $100; and pink-colored $500 denominations)
Armand Slinger – Arm Robber (REWARD: $900)
Bunny & Clod – Petty Thieves (REWARD: $1,000)
Emil “The Cat” Donovan – Cat Burglar (REWARD: $800)
Felicia Field – Sneak(er) Thief (REWARD: $900)
Hans Offe – Pickpocket (REWARD: $900)
John Doe – Buck Passer (REWARD: $800)
Luke Warm – Auto Thief, etc. (REWARD: $1,000)
Ruby Diamond – Jewel Thief (REWARD: $800)
Saul Teen – Safecracker (REWARD: $1,000)
The Brain – ????? (REWARD: $1,000)
32 STOP THIEF! SLEUTH cards, consisting of:
BACK TO ACME DETECTIVE AGENCY (You or Another Detective) [x2]
BUY A TIP FOR $50 [x4]
BUY A TIP FOR $100 [x2]
COLLECT $100 FROM ANOTHER DETECTIVE [x2]
COLLECT $200 FROM ANOTHER DETECTIVE [x2]
FREE TIP [x4]
GO 3 EXTRA SPACES
GO 4 EXTRA SPACES [x2]
GO 5 EXTRA SPACES
GO 6 EXTRA SPACES
LOSE A TURN [x3]
MOVE ANYWHERE [x2]
PRESS “CLUE” BUTTON 3 EXTRA TIMES
PRESS “CLUE” BUTTON 4 EXTRA TIMES
PRESS “CLUE” BUTTON 5 EXTRA TIMES
PRESS “CLUE” BUTTON 6 EXTRA TIMES
TAKE ANOTHER TURN [x3]
The game rules booklet
Box contents of the 1979 game, Stop Thief
Aside from the inner plastic tray that holds the loose game parts and the cardboard space filler, that’s it! NOTE: The box art shown in this blog entry is from the Canadian version. The American version had a black background, and only English wording. All the contents of both versions are the same, with the exception of the Canadian version being in both English and French.
I remember very well the buzz at the gaming table about a certain balding protagonist of a now-classic Sierra adventure game. He wasn’t your typical adventure game hero: he was a bumbler, a loser, an everyman shooting for the DD stars. All he wanted was a piece of the action. Well, a piece, at any rate. With the release of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards Sierra On-Line in 1987, the 3D animated adventure game series entered a new, more (im)mature era, and a gaming icon was born. (A little tidbit: 3D in this case meant “Dancing, Drinking, and Dames.”)
Box art for Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards
Poor Larry was a luckless virgin with absolutely no game. He dressed in badly dated clothing and wore a gold chain, and by the start of the game, had come to the city of Lost Wages for one last shot at sleeping with a woman. The game began outside a bar with Larry vowing to become an ex-virgin. For many gamers, Leisure Suit Larry symbolized their own struggle to negotiate the turbulent waters of dealing with the opposite gender, and the game struck a nerve. If Larry could get lucky, any of us could, darn it!
Leisure Suit Larry creator, Al Lowe
The creative force tapped to make Leisure Suit Larry a reality was a programmer at Sierra who had previously guided some of the Disney licenses, such as The Black Cauldron, Donald Duck’s Playground, and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood. Based on that body of work, who knew that Al Lowe would have such a twisted sense of humor? Al Lowe was an accomplished musician (complete with a degree in music), and had spent 15 years in the public school system teaching music. He enjoyed playing games, and decided to teach himself programming to make his own, and enter a new career. He completed a few games (Troll’s Tale and Dragon’s Keep were two of them) and sold them to the fledgling Sierra On-Line company, and stayed with them for 16 years.
Box art for Softporn Adventure by On-Line Systems
By his own admission, Al Lowe based much of Leisure Suit Larry on an old text adventure game written by Chuck Benton called Softporn Adventure. The game revolved around the player finding various inventory items to get into the pants of several women – sound familiar? Softporn Adventure was released for the Apple II system in 1981, selling 50,000 units for its publisher, On-Line Systems, (which eventually became Sierra On-Line). Considering Apple had sold around 350,000 Apple II systems by 1981, Softporn Adventure was a decent sized hit. Given that the Software Piracy Association’s estimated piracy rate was 40%, it was more likely that there were 70,000 copies floating around, which would be closer to 20% total market penetration. (Al Lowe claims the ratio to be 100,000 Apple II PCs and 25,000 Softporn games sold, but his statement may have been a little bit of poetic license.) Here’s a little historical tidbit for you: check out the lady on the right in the pic above…that’s Roberta Williams, in the buff.
Outside Lefty's bar in Leisure Suit Larry
With sales like this, it’s little wonder that Ken Williams (husband of Roberta and one of the founders of Sierra) approached Al Lowe to make a new game with a similar motif. They discussed updating Softporn Adventure to fit in the new 3-D animated adventure line-up, but as Lowe recalls telling Williams, “There’s no way I can do this as a serious game. It’s so out of it that it should be wearing a leisure suit…But if you let me mock it, I might be able to do a spoof of it.” And so, six months of programming later, Leisure Suit Larry entered the marketplace, with a very quiet launch to avoid incurring the wrath of Sierra’s major distributors (like the unamused charcoal-gray suits in the Tandy Corporation headquarters, who were responsible for up to 40% of Sierra’s software sales).
Hot tub babe in Leisure Suit Larry
Sales were very soft that first week, with only 4,000 copies sold; no advertising and no fanfare had its expected result. However, word-of-mouth was as powerful in 1987 as it is today, and sales jumped to an impressive 250,000 copies sold. The game even managed to garner the Software Publishers Association’s Best Fantasy, Role Playing or Adventure Game of 1987. It was eventually released on several platforms, including IBM PC (MS-DOS), Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Apple Macintosh, and the TRS-80.
Cover art for the VGA remake of Leisure Suit Larry
With the advent of VGA technology, Sierra brought Leisure Suit Larry to a new audience in 1991. It was relaunched with a completely redone game engine that used an icon-driven interface rather than a text-based parser, which was touted by the game packaging as an opportunity to “point-and-grope.” The re-release used an updated SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter) engine, which permitted 256-color VGA graphics. This was quite the improvement upon the original 1987 game, whose highest graphics quality was 16 colors in a 300×200 screen.
Lefty's bar in the 1991 VGA remake of Leisure Suit Larry
Another avenue that Al Lowe was able to exercise his creative spirit within Larry’s universe was putting his music roots to good use by composing the theme music for the Land of the Lounge Lizards. The music was an integral component of Larry’s impending iconic status, using the primitive sound technology of the early PCs to create a jaunty tune that was easily identifiable as Larry’s theme. The VGA remake also had access to better audio technology, and so the music is much richer. There’s also much more of it, as Lowe could really only fit so much audio into a single 3.5″ or two 5.25″ floppy diskettes (what the original 1987 game came loaded on).
Musical score for Leisure Suit Larry
Al Lowe’s creation sold well enough that sequels were a highly anticipated inevitability. Lounge Lizards was followed by 1988′s Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking For Love (in Several Wrong Places), which was followed by 1989′s Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals. Typical of Lowe’s humorous approach to the series, the fourth game released in 1991 was actually entitled Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work. Lowe followed up that game in 1993 with Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up Or Slip Out!. Lowe’s final Larry game was 1996′s Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail. The dawn of true 3-D adventures was upon the gaming industry, but Sierra did not have the cash reserves to retool their flagship titles to the new standard. Subsequently, Al Lowe was let go, ending his run as the narrator of the Leisure Suit Larry series, and ending Leisure Suit Larry‘s relevance. Yes, more games in the series would be released, but they would be empty shells, devoid of the charm that Al Lowe captured for so many years, victims of the rise of the bean-counters in the gaming industry. (Al Lowe is still on the Internet, and you can find him at his website: allowe.com How this creative man isn’t absolutely deluged with consultation requests from up-and-coming indie software developers amazes me.)
Hot tub babe from the 1991 version of Leisure Suit Larry I
If you have managed to avoid playing the original Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, it’s time for that to end. Yes, the graphics are hopelessly dated in comparison to the real-world graphic opuses that populate the gamerverse these days…but the joy of Leisure Suit Larry isn’t in the eye candy, it’s in the situational comedy coupled with Al Lowe’s scripting. Pick up a copy – this game is worth any retrogamer’s retrogaming time!
Opening credits and Tandy DAC music for Leisure Suit Larry (1987)
As most old-school gamers know, the company was founded by the power-gaming couple of Ken and Roberta Williams in 1980. Back then it was known On-Line Systems. The games Mystery House and Time Zone were first released under this label.
By 1982, the company changed its name to Sierra On-Line, but used two other labels to sell some of their product line. SierraVenture was created to sell the company’s re-released software that once sold under the On-Line Systems brand, while the company’s action/arcade games were to be produced under the SierraVision label. Both logos were discontinued in 1984, and the company published all their titles under the Sierra On-Line label.
As revenues increased, so did buying opportunities for Sierra, which had become a software juggernaut. The company acquired other software companies, often including both logos on subsequent products. Purchases included…
Wargaming has historically been a niche market, as most war games tend to be long on detail and not suited for those short on attention spans. One game transcended the genre, becoming a popular and nearly iconic board game: Risk, by Parker Brothers.
Thank-you, France!
Like the Statue of Liberty and French maids, Risk was a gift from France. The game was originally entitled, “La Conquête du Monde,” and was invented by Albert Lamorisse, a French playwright and director who had won the 1956 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his short film, “The Red Balloon,” as well as the 1956 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Lamorisse was a creative force, and his movies were masterpieces of elegant simplicity that were filled with metaphors and as layered as an onion. It is no surprise that La Conquête du Monde was a similar effort. The game that became Risk was and is a work of irony, and designed to show players what kind of person it takes to rule the world through war: an iron fist to destroy resistance, a subtle tongue to convince others to ally against common enemies, and an amoral capacity to betray any ally or friend to win the field. Machiavelli and Bismarck would have done well.
La Conquête du Monde game box
Lamorisse entered into an agreement with Miro, a French publishing company, which distributed the La Conquête du Monde in 1957, with a few minor revisions. The game caught the attention of Parker Brothers, who negotiated the North American publishing rights with Miro, and brought Risk to the American audience in 1959, adding the cards to improve game play, as well as using wooden cubes for the army tokens. As for Lamorisse, the filmmaker did not attempt a repeat of his efforts, and returned to his filmmaking roots, to which he remained devoted until his untimely death in a helicopter accident during a movie shoot at the young age of 48.
Albert Lamorisse and The Red Balloon
Game play in Risk is quite straightforward. First, each player receives his or her share of army tokens. The amount depends on how many players there are: 40 armies each for 2 players; 35 armies each for 3 players; 30 armies each for 4 players; 25 armies each for 5 players; and 20 armies each for 6 players. The game board is then set up by players taking turns placing an army unit on an empty territory until every territory is occupied. At that point players add their remaining armies to whichever territories they own (taking turns doing so). With the game board filled, the actual game begins.
1959 (top) and 1975 (bottom) Risk game parts
Players make alliances (or not) and begin their quest to conquer the world by attacking a rival player’s territory. The outcome depends on the roll of the dice: the attacker uses up to three red dice (one for each army being used in the attack); the defender uses up to two white dice (one for each army committed for defence). The highest roll wins the field (ties go to the defender). The attacker’s highest die roll is compared to the defender’s highest die roll, and the lower die loses an army. This process is repeated with the second die, which means that the result is either up to 2 armies lost for either the attacker or defender, or one lost for each. If the defender loses all their territory’s occupying armies, the attacker can move their units forward into it.
The 1959 Risk game box
The game would be over fairly quickly if that was all there was to playing Risk. Armies are constantly replenished in one of two ways: either from a natural growth based on how many territories they occupy or by collecting and redeeming Risk cards, which are a set of 44 cards, one for each territory and two “wild” cards. Each one has a symbol for artillery or cavalry or infantry, and can be traded in for more army units. To do so the player must either collect three cards with all the same symbol, or one of each symbol. (Each player can never have more than 5 cards; if they do, they must turn in a set at the end of their turn.) Every time a player conquers a territory, they collect a Risk card, which means that to the victor truly go the spoils.
Risk: Star Wars Original Trilogy Edition game box
There have been many variations of Risk through the years. The first North American release in 1959 included coloured wooden cubes for armies, but by the 1975 version, these had become plastic. The 1993 edition included plastic miniatures of infantry, cavalry, and artillery rather than geometric shapes, only to come full circle and return to wooden pieces with the “nostalgia” game series of 2003 and the “Continental” version (a reproduction of the 1959 version) in 2009. Risk can be found in different settings, such as the Lord of the Rings Trilogy Edition (2003), Star Wars Original Trilogy (2006), or the Risk: Transformers (2007) editions, although gameplay remains the same throughout each.
The 2008 Risk Revised Edition game box
Risk has also evolved with new rules or game maps. Risk / Castle Risk was a set produced in 1992 and introduced new game elements and strategies for winning, as well as a completely different game board. Risk 2210 A.D. introduced time limits, a rudimentary economic system, further game board changes, and special powers for certain units. Risk: Balance of Power (2008) centered the game map on Europe and is limited to only two players. Finally, Risk: Revised Edition (2008) introduced objectives, new victory conditions, and game pieces. Much like what has happened to Monopoly, there’s a version of Risk out there for everyone.
Kramer learns that the Ukraine is far from weak…
1980′s television commercial for Parker Brothers Risk
