Monday 6 April 2015
Cover to Cover SSI Summer 1986 Catalog pp 2 3
Battle of Antietam is another Civil War military wargame, with an improved battle system that was further refined in Battle of Gettysburg (on page 1, see yesterdays post), and was making its debut on the IBM PC, a gaming platform that was just starting to get off the ground, handicapped as it was by the limited CGA graphics standard. Computer Baseball shows us what detailed baseball strategy games looked like before interactive, animated ballgame visuals became standard; it must have been popular, as it seems to have been converted to most of the extant platforms. Field of Fire is another wargame, which from the screenshot shown, appears to have originated on the Atari computers and was now coming to the Apple II. And Wizards Crown was another party-based RPG inspired by Dungeons & Dragons; an official license would become SSIs bread and butter a few years later.
Page 3 takes a brief break from the computer games to announce some games in development, and push posters and Computer Gaming World magazine:
Today, developers keep their upcoming titles quiet until theyre getting closer to market, but SSI was eager to talk about some upcoming products, some of which apparently never saw release. Of the new games, we can guess that the hinted-at "in the works" games included Gemstone Healer (1986), sequel to Gemstone Warrior. I cant see that the promised Shiloh wargame was ever released, though SSI had already released a game in 1981 called Battle of Shiloh so perhaps it morphed into another product or was simply abandoned. 1986s Warship was probably the "tactical simulation of World War II surface naval combat in the Pacific" referred to here; the "monster of a game" seems not to have come out, and perhaps one game about the Pacific conflict was enough for this round.
The conversions likely saw release, as it was good business to port established hits to other platforms. And I wonder how many people bought the posters -- they are likely rare today, if not particularly valuable.
It was not uncommon to see cross-promotion like the CGW ad at the time -- the industry was still growing, and it behooved every publisher to do its best to bring more people into the market, and SSI was just promoting the publication without taking a cut as a middleman here. (I trust Computer Gaming Worlds reviewers had also been generally kind to SSIs products!)
To be continued next weekend, if all goes as planned, with more games...
