Retro Gaming Museum
  • Home
  • The Collection
  • Hardware
    • Commodore
    • Sinclair Research
    • SpectraVideo
    • Nintendo
    • Amstrad
    • IBM
  • Software
    • Sierra Online
    • Infocom
    • Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI)
  • Gallery
  • Video
    • Complete Video Walkthrough
  • Donations
  • Contact
  • About

The Collection

Multispiel 4106

8/30/2016

Comments

 
Picture

​From a dusty corner of the universe, we bring one of the relics of the Retro Gaming Museum, a Multispiel 4106 from Universum, a (West) German company that released a bunch of Pong machines during the late 70s/early 80s. This particular model from 1981 also featured a lightgun of sorts, which sadly is not included with the machine we have. Despite the included sidearm, this machine was wildly popular due to it being available via the Quelle shopping catalog.
Picture

​The machine included 6 games, some which were solely intended to be played with the lightgun, while the others all involved white paddles chasing a moving dot across the screen.
Picture

​The “controllers” are those two sliders at the bottom - it doesn’t get much simpler than that, does it?

​Text : Arni Vikingur
Comments

Codename: ICEMAN

8/26/2016

Comments

 
Picture

From the “Golden Era” of Sierra On-Line’s catalogue comes a game about a covert rescue mission set against the backdrop of the Cold War. The mission, should the player accept it, is to rescue an ambassador in Tunisia from Soviet-aligned forces. This translates into various in-game activities as piloting a sub, playing dice games, and making sure you do everything By The Book.
Picture

The sad fact is that despite the awesome looking box and cool premise, Codename: Iceman is not fondly remembered today. The game’s biggest problem lies with its lead designer Jim Walls, whose demand that players always follow regulations and not pointing out their in-game mistakes, led to much frustration among players as it was very simple to end up in unwinnable situations.
Picture

Text : Arni Vikingur
Comments

Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition

8/25/2016

Comments

 
Picture
Picture
​
​Balance of Power is a computer strategy game of geopolitics during the Cold War, created by Chris Crawford and published in 1985 on the Apple Macintosh by Mindscape, followed by ports to a variety of platforms over the next two years.

In the game the player takes the role of the President of the United States or General Secretary of the Soviet Union. The goal is to improve the player's country's standing in the world relative to the other superpower. During each yearly turn, random events occur that may have effects on the player's international prestige. The player can choose to respond to these events in various ways, which may prompt a response from the other superpower. This creates brinkmanship situations between the two nations, potentially escalating to a nuclear war, which ends the game.

​Crawford was already fairly well known for earlier games, especially Eastern Front (1941). His 1984 announcement that he was moving to the Macintosh platform to work on an entirely new idea in gaming generated considerable interest. It was widely and positively reviewed after its release, including an extremely positive review in The New York Times Magazine. It was widely praised for its inventive nonaction gameplay that was nevertheless exciting and a distinct alternative to the more common arcade games of the era. It has been named as one of the most innovative computer games of all time.

Hugely successful on the Mac, the addition of an IBM PC port late in the year made it a best seller. Ultimately selling over a quarter million units although it only ran on relatively new platforms, it represented a not-insignificant fraction of all video game sales through 1985 and 86. It spawned a number of sequels and copycats, but none of these were as successful as the original.



After Balance, Crawford began work on an entirely new game, Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot, released in 1987 and selling only a few thousand copies. Mindscape was disappointed, and pressured Crawford to do a follow-up to Balance. This was released in 1989 as Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition (sometimes referred to as Balance of Power II) on the Apple IIGS, Windows, Macintosh, Amiga and Atari ST and that is the version we got here at the Museum.

Picture
Comments

PC gaming in the year 2000

8/23/2016

Comments

 
Picture

Here at the Museum we just assembled a PC computer from the 2000 era. It´s a IBM Aptiva with a Pentium !!! 600 Mhz cpu, 10GB Harddrive with Windows 98 installed. It´s a great system to showcase most of the games from this time period.  ​Computers were still young in in 2000. The generations of computers existing in 2,000 were primarily of the Pentium 3, K6-23D, and Athlon line, by AMD and Intel respectively. Cyrix processors were still being manufactured in 2,000, but they were not very competitive performing less work per clock cycle. Cyrix died out completely soon after.
Picture

Games where mostly all released in CD-ROM and sound capabilities where no longer midi files which relied on a good sound card, we where getting the full professional recorded music on wav files. So having a good speaker system was almost an standard to enjoy this quality sound. 
Picture

​We got a stack of CD-ROM games from this period to test out on our "new" computer :) PC gaming remained popular throughout the decade, but was in an overall decline as console graphics technically advanced. Publishers also liked the standardisation that consoles provided, whereas PC game performance was dependent on the graphic capabilities of a player's hardware. Nevertheless, the PC remained the device of choice for many popular strategy, simulation, and online games.
Picture

​Here is a shot if the CPU that is inside the computer. It´s the first Pentium III variant the Katmai (Intel product code 80525). It was a further development of the Deschutes Pentium II. The Pentium III saw an increase of 2 million transistors over the Pentium II and it has the same cartridge based design. The philosophy behind it was that anyone could just plug in and out a new CPU as they evolved over time. Just like games for NES consoles.  
Comments

Day of the Tentacle

8/19/2016

Comments

 
Picture

​Day of the Tentacle, also known as Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle, is a 1993 graphic adventure game developed and published by LucasArts. It is the sequel to the 1987 game Maniac Mansion. The game's plot follows Bernard Bernoulli and his friends Hoagie and Laverne as they attempt to stop the evil Purple Tentacle—a sentient, disembodied tentacle—from taking over the world. The player takes control of the trio and solves puzzles while using time travel to explore different periods of history.

Picture
​
​Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer co-led the game's development, their first time in such a role. The pair carried over a limited number of elements from Maniac Mansion and forwent the character selection aspect to simplify development. Inspirations included Chuck Jones cartoons and the history of the United States. Day of the Tentacle is the eighth LucasArts title to use the SCUMM engine.

​The game was released simultaneously on floppy disk and CD-ROM to critical acclaim and commercial success. Critics focused on its cartoon-style visuals and comedic elements. Day of the Tentacle has featured regularly in lists of "top" games published more than two decades after its release, and aspects have been referenced in popular culture. A remaster of Day of the Tentacle was developed by Schafer's current studio, Double Fine Productions, and released on March 22, 2016 for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Windows and OS X.
Picture
Comments
<<Previous
    Picture

    Yngvi Th. Johannsson

    Retro gaming enthusiast and all around computer collector. 

    Check out youtube site for more videos !

    Archives

    May 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015

    Categories

    All
    Amstrad
    Artwork
    Atari
    Commodore
    DOS/WINDOWS
    Fairchild
    GameCube
    Joystick
    Nintendo
    PC Hardware
    Playstation
    Playstation 4
    Pong Machines
    Retro Hunt
    Sega Mega Drive
    Sega Saturn
    Sharp Computers
    Sinclair
    Spectravideo
    Xbox

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • The Collection
  • Hardware
    • Commodore
    • Sinclair Research
    • SpectraVideo
    • Nintendo
    • Amstrad
    • IBM
  • Software
    • Sierra Online
    • Infocom
    • Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI)
  • Gallery
  • Video
    • Complete Video Walkthrough
  • Donations
  • Contact
  • About