Advertising From Yesteryear…The GEnie Network

Back in 1992, the Internet was still primarily a government-funded entity comprised of research and educational websites. It wasn’t until Delphi began a national online provider service targeted for the consumer mass market that same year that the Internet as we know it today began to take root.  This was an incredible time of experimentation, and the possibilities seemed endless.  Businesses recognized the Wild West nature of the online world, and tried to be the Railroad Barons of their day, while others simply tried to fill a niche for modest profit.

One of the services offered was the GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange), which began in the mid-1980s as a way of capitalizing on the little utilized time on the GEIS mainframe (which primarily served up business applications during business hours).  By 1992 GEnie was offering multi-player games with “100% Organic Opponents” over their service, which you could access with your 300, 1200 or (if you were wealthy) 2400 baud modem. Games included BattleTech (MechWarrior), Air Warrior, and the Dragon’s Gate RPG.  These were heady times, when you could blow a lot of money playing an online game ($36 per daytime hour!). With a user-base that could only grow as PCs made their relentless march across the North American landscape, GEnie seemed like a free money…to any other business than General Electric, that is. In another case of stuffed-shirt executives unaware of the technological changes taking place, GE’s management team did not expand the service’s infrastructure, and eventually sold it off to a company with even worse management, and by 1999 the Internet waved farewell to GEnie forever.

But enough of the doom and gloom of foolish executives and the remains of their companies strewn across the landscape of the Mighty Al Gore Superhighway!  Instead, let us look back at GEnie’s advertising from 1992 (found in an issue of Dragon Magazine), when the world was puddle-wonderful with potential! Enjoy!

Get your lungs ripped out on GEnie in 1992

Catalog Cavalcade: Spectrum HoloByte 1992 Product Catalog

This week’s Catalog Cavalcade takes us back to 1992, with the company that brought us the (then) technologically brilliant Falcon 3.0 PC game. Spectrum HoloByte was a software company founded in 1983 that pumped out some great games, including the Falcon series, various games based on Alexey Pajitnov’s ideas (including bringing Tetris to the PC), car racing sims (Stunt Driver and Vette!), and one of the most underrated political simulations of all time, Crisis in the Kremlin. The company was sold to Hasbro, Inc. (the Evil Empire) in 1998, and its development house was shut down that same year. However, in 1992, Spectrum HoloByte was still a thriving software business, so much so that it would go on to purchase MicroProse Software the next year. Below is the catalog of Spectrum HoloByte’s offerings in 1992 – just click on the image to open up the .pdf file! Enjoy!

1992 Spectrum HoloByte Catalog

Retrogaming Game Maps: Darklands (PC)

Back in 1992, MicroProse released a RPG that sent gamers back to the 15th Century to stave off the Apocalypse.  Darklands was set in and around what we now call Germany, with real old-world city names and locations, and remains the only game set in the Holy Roman Empire (that I am aware of).  It was (and is!) a great game to play, but only after fully patched; it was riddled with bugs upon its original release, some of which crashed the game straight to the DOS prompt!

Darklands remains a sought-after retro game, but, on occasion, a copy of the game is missing its game map.  Well, break out the color printer and get ready to adventure in the chaos of 15th Century Germania, because here is the game map for all to use! (Click on the map to see it in its full-sized glory!)

 

Darklands (1992) game map.