Tag Archives: early

Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress, ColecoVision

Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress is a dungeon-crawling action game, designed and coded by Tom Loughry with graphics by Keri Longaway (nee, Janssen), and first published by Activision for the Coleco Adam and ColecoVision console in 1985.

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The Hobbit, PC

The 1983 MS-DOS version of Beam Software‘s classic text adventure, The Hobbit, allows you to choose between 40 or 80 column display for the text parser, and whether you want to play the game with pictures or not.

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Kaboom!, Atari 2600

Another simple Atari 2600 game with compelling gameplay: Kaboom! is a 1981 Activision game where you must catch falling bombs (dropped by what looks like a burglar, but we’ll call him The Mad Bomber) onto a set of bats, without allowing any bombs to hit the ground below you.

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Frank N Stein, Amstrad CPC

Frank N Stein on the Amstrad CPC is more or less the same as the ZX Spectrum original, except that the colours are different in this, and the Amstrad version has a really good high score table (which the original doesn’t). It was first published by PSS and Amsoft in 1985.

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Frank N Stein, ZX Spectrum

Frank N Stein is a simple Manic Miner-style platform game based on Mary Shelley‘s classic horror story, Frankenstein. It was written by Colin Stewart and published for the ZX Spectrum by PSS Software in 1984.

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Frankenstein’s Monster, Atari 2600

Frankenstein’s Monster is a relatively obscure game for the Atari 2600 and was developed and published by Data Age, Inc. in 1983. It is one of the earliest video games to use the famous Mary Shelley novel as the basis for its story and gameplay.

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Arcadia, ZX Spectrum

Written by David H. Lawson and published by Imagine Software in 1982, Arcadia is another early Spectrum game that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but has not weathered the sands of time well at all…

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Ah Diddums, ZX Spectrum

Written by David H. Lawson (co-founder of Imagine Software), Ah Diddums is a 1983 action game in which you play as a teddy bear trying to escape from inside a toy box (to comfort his crying baby owner) by arranging coloured blocks into a staircase the top of the screen. This allows him to climb up to the next level. And there are 99 levels in this particular toy box, so his journey is going to be a long one…

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Future Spy, Arcade

In Sega‘s 1984 arcade game, Future Spy, you fly an F-15 jet fighter across an isometric landscape, shooting down enemy aircraft while at the same time dropping bombs on ships, submarines, and ground forces.

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