Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 144: Broderbund

Episode Date: March 26, 2018

By request of patron Jeff Vlasek, we circle back around to go deep on Brøderbund, a company whose catalog we've touched on numerous times over the past year under the aegis of other subjects. This episode, though, it's all Brøderbund, all the time!

This weekend Retronauts, an hour of brooding. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this thrilling episode of Retronauts. Jeremy Parish. And this week, we are bringing a topic to you by patron request. Thanks, Jeff Vlossack. I hope I pronounced your name correctly. I assume it's like the pickles. And yes, by supporting Retronauts through Patreon at the, what is the? It's like the Ultra 64 tier. He got to pick a topic. And he said, hey, retronauts, will you talk about the games of Broaderbund? And then I looked it up and it turns out it's Bruderbund. So now we know we can put that and we'll pronounce it however we end up pronouncing it because it's uh it's yeah I think the

company always just went by broader button or broderbund or something anyway they just write it funny yes um which is not even the original spelling right we can we can we can talk about all of that uh but in the in the in the in the moment this moment why don't you guys introduce yourselves let's start at the far end oh mix it different all right so I'm Ben Elgin and you're here because and I'm here because I'm old and played a lot of old games. And some of those old games are by Bruderbund. That's right. That's correct. And also? And you're here because I have also played many Broderbund games. I thought you were going to say because you just like showed up on the doorstep and we're like, hey, what's up? Yeah, I said, I need to work. Give me gin. Please.

We'll talk for gin. May I have more gin? Uh, yes. We haven't even broke out of the gym yet. Have we, have we done the Oliver Twist? Yeah, we did. We did the PIP and stuff. No, that's great expectations. Please, Pip. Oh, wow. Bring me some gin. We're sober now. Just imagine how this is going to get after the break. Okay. So anyway, yes, Bruderbund is a company that still exists in some sort of permutation, but not really. The brand exists. Yes, the brand exists. The company was destroyed through a merger because that's what happens when people merge. They are destroyed. And such as the way of video game history, people do great things for 15, 20 years, and then are shattered irrevocably by corporations and capitalism. Good times.

But we're going to talk about what happened before capitalism stepped in and shattered the band of brothers. And that is where we're going with Bruterman. So before we get started, what experience do you guys have with Bruderbund games? Man, so probably the earliest was a bunch of their Apple 2 output, some of which we talked about on the Apple two episode um because they have we will definitely be retracing some familiar territory here but this is by request by god and we are going to live up to that expectation yeah no and then they're worth talking about more than once probably um but so they had a lot of apple two output in their early years and a lot of that stuff ended up in schools um so i think that's probably where a lot of people ran

into the first is a lot of their their games and some of their educational stuff and some of their utilities would be in schools in the 80s um so that's where you'd see them first bench it's amazing how broad brood how brood the brooder in marketing you know

the categories they reached with their product as a publisher from desktop applications to PC games to even

NES publishing over the years so I have experience with all of that and like

I don't know if we could we shouldn't talk about specifics right now because we're going to talk about each one of these we can talk

a little bit about specifics. There's nothing wrong with that. Like, I remember Load Runner, Speedlunker, the Midnight, David's Midnight Magic, even. I don't know if we're going to talk about that, but I saw that. You can definitely talk about it. I don't know anything about it, but please. It's a pinball game.

Okay. Yeah. We will definitely get there. Not that great right now, but by today's standards, but it was exciting back then. And, you know, the print shop was a really big thing for them. that sort of shaped my childhood educational experiences and soccer teams.

The coaches would use that to make calendars and teachers would print giant banners out on tractor feed paper. Yeah, definitely lots of that. I think some of the highlight ones that stick out in my memory that we'll get to, but that I really remember for a lot of one are Karatica. That was definitely a really big one. And then Carmen San Diego. some of their Mac stuff to shuffle puck, which we talked about in our Mac episodes.

That was great. Yeah, when you look back, Bruderbund was really just this, I feel like an omnipresent force in gaming and even computing in general in the 80s and early 90s. Like, I didn't own a computer until sometime in the 90s, but I would still, like, what encounters I did have with computers, I feel like Bruderbund was always there,

that logo with the three crowns. Like that is, I see, you know, doing research for this episode, looking through images and screenshots and stuff. And anytime I see, you know, that, that triple crown image reproduced in low resolution, like, CGA graphics or whatever, I'm just like, it takes you back. It does. It really just like, it throws me way back in time. You'd see it on the shelf at Babbage's software, et cetera.

They'd be all over the place there. Yeah, my student lab, computer lab in like fifth, sixth grade. So mid-80s, it was mostly, I've talked about this before, TI-994As because that's what everyone had around there. And when I was in sixth grade, they were replaced with Macintoshes, which were clearly like a huge step forward. But there was always the one Apple II computer on the teacher's desk that I don't know what she used it for exactly.

but grades maybe but the thing is you know like I would volunteer to help out in the lab and you know clean up and everything and then when I was done she would let me play load runner on that computer and that's what I wanted to play like she had other stuff like choplifter which is also a breeder bun game and you know like maze chase type games but I always wanted to play load runner on that one game on that that that that one computer the the disused Apple 2 that that was the teacher's computer and the students never got to use So, like, to me, that was, it made the whole thing very special. Like, there is still this kind of aura around Lodrunner for me because it was, it was inaccessible and it was a special privilege to be able to play that game.

And one of the first games I bought for NES when I got an NES a few years later was Lod Runner, which was ported by Hudson and was pretty different in feel from the Apple II game, but still, like, recognizably that same game. So it was, it was very satisfying to have the ability. to play that game at home. It's funny that you said that about the Apple 2 and Load Runner, because about 10 years ago, this guy from Virginia drove down to my house and, you know, he contacted me through my blog, Vintage Computing, and he had said he had some computers for me

and he dropped off essentially like an entire elementary school's worth of Apple 2 stuff, several computers and systems and accessories in like 10 boxes of disks. You know, there's a lot of mech stuff, MECC, you know, the Oregon Trail people. Yep. But there's also, you know, there's people, there are grading things. There was actual grades from kids in the 80s and discs and stuff.

But then there's a copy of Load Runner. I'm not even joking. That's one of the first things. That game was a multi-million seller. It was huge. It was a smash hit. I think that wasn't their biggest seller. Their biggest seller was print shop and then missed, but definitely.

And Carmen, San Diego, maybe? Yeah, it was up there. But I think, I think those. three games were like the big ones. Yeah. Especially, you know, once Lodrunner started getting ported to consoles. I didn't know they published Mists. I didn't even think about that.

Yeah, I did. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Broderbund was a pretty big force all the way into the 90s. And they published some of my favorite NES games, like Legacy of the Wizard and. That's right. My show.

Deadly Towers. That's right. Deadly Towers. Yeah. Don't go into a rubbery, though. Yeah. Oh, no. Don't look at the window.

I see him. All right, so Bruderbund, the history of, a few months. Actually, I guess to last summer, I recorded an episode with David Craddick, the author of a book called Breakout, How Apple II Jump Started, PZ Revolution or something along those lines. Anyway, David has two chapters in that book, which is specifically about the Apple Two, but it really gets into the history of Bruderbund and where the company came from, and it has a lot of, you know, first-person sources. Like, he actually went and talked to the people who founded the company.

It's the best and most insightful history of Bruderbund I've ever seen, and it's definitely worth reading. So if you haven't checked that out, if you somehow didn't hear that episode of Retronauts and think, I need to go buy this book. Well, please go check it out because it's really good. It is good. I can corroborate. I read those chapters last night and this morning, and they were good.

But basically, Bruderbund was founded around 1980 by two brothers and one sister, which makes the name of the company a little bit of a lie, because Bruderbund is, if you're think Danish for Band of Brothers. So it was two brothers and one sister. There was going to be three brothers, but the third one was like, eh, you know, computers, I don't really care. And the sister was like, you know, actually I do.

So it's more like band of siblings, but I guess that doesn't you know, read as well. Sibli bond. Exactly. So they put together this company and as with so many things in the history of computing, vintage computing, they

started out very small, very shoestring, kind of a, you know, scraping by desperately for a few years until they finally hit it big. And once they hit it big, then they were giants. Like they became one of the biggest publishers of computer software. They dabbled in, you know, video game publishing. They licensed their games out. And, you know, not only did they have huge hits in the 80s, but again, with Mist, they had the biggest game in the 90s until Sims came along in 2000.

So, yeah, Bruderbund was a big, big deal. Like I said, they were very omnipresent. And we were talking before the show about the name Bruderbund. It does mean Bander Brothers, but it has kind of a little bit of an uncomfortable origin to it. Ben, do you want to talk about that? Because it seemed to, like, definitely stick with you. Yeah, I just read, I got this information from Craddock's book, and I briefly read it about it was the name of like a white supremacist group in South Africa. Yep.

A pro-Africans. A white nationalist. group, yeah. And that's all I know. I don't know why. I don't remember why they picked the name. Well, the way it got in is because it was one of the group names in

the 4X game that one of the brothers was writing, the Galactic, what was it? Galactic Empire. There was this trading federation that he gave this name just as kind of a and like there being ominous almost worked, I think, as funny because it was one of the rival factions in the game. But then he just liked the name

It has a good sound to it. I mean, the meaning of it is good. Yeah. Like Band of Brothers. That was a big hit on HBO. Did they have any connection to South Africa, these brothers? No, they actually had a connection to Sweden. So very far away from South Africa.

Like the opposite end of that hemisphere. How did they even know about the South African group? I think they... I don't actually know that. I'd have just been looking for interesting names for the game. But yeah, I don't think it really occurred to them like, oh, hey, this might be distasteful until people from South Africa, you know, the game started making their way down there and people in South Africa were like, really, guys? Did you actually do that? But they spelled the name a little different. In the South African name, the bowel, the first vowel is a diphthong. It's an OE. Yeah, OE. Whereas this is an O with a slash through it. And it's actually, even though they are like closely connected to Sweden and one of the brothers, I think Gary Carlston.

was like the coach for a Swedish basketball girls team, which sounds like a pretty good gig. They actually ended up going with a Danish name. So it's just a big mess of international references that really has nothing to do with the company itself. But it is an unusual origin for the name. And the sort of cultural ramifications have nothing to do with the software they're created, which was great. Like, they, their games and their software, you know, they, they said in Craddock's book, I think Doug Carlston, the brother who really started the company up, I think it was him who said, like, basically, they were looking for good ideas.

They were looking for things that no one else had brought to the market where they saw an opportunity, you know, like a niche they could fill. So they would take, you know, demos and submissions from people like these amateur coders, And they might have been broken and even unfinished or just like a raw idea. But if they saw a spark of innovation and creativity in that demo, then they didn't really care about the polish or about the technical finesse because they brought on their own coders. They had programmers in house who could work with that designer and help them realize their vision. And that's a great, great corporate mission.

I mean, obviously they were there to make money and they made lots of money. but, you know, the driving business model there was like, let's bring something new to the market. Let's give people with great ideas an opportunity to realize their dreams. I love that. And I really feel like one of the reasons Broaderbund, Bruderbund, whatever games resonate with people so much is because, you know, there is that driving instinct behind them. Like the idea of, you know, giving people a new experience and really fostering creativity. And, like, that's what a publisher should be. A publisher should be the people who come in and say, we have the resources, we have the money, you have the ideas.

Let's get together and make this thing happen. And I don't know that that methodology really exists that much in today's games industry. But, you know, things were more freewheeling back then. The industry, computers and video games were much smaller than they are now. Yeah, well, it's interesting you said that because the whole game industry was sort of like an indie industry back then, like the indies are now. Yeah, you basically had Atari working for Warner and that was that was it. Everyone else was stinky. Yeah, so they didn't have these corporate publishing giants like EA, squeezing the life out of everything.

No, EA back then was like Broderbund. Yeah, they were like, we're electronic artists. We create great things. We're visionaries. Totally different back then. But I'm just saying it wasn't like the EA of today. Right. That's what I'm trying to. Yeah, they really embrace this model of just just going out and finding people. If you look at the history, only like some of their very early games were actually originated in house. Everything else was someone, you know, somebody was submitting something and they latched on to it. And so you have all these like really interesting people coming through like, you know, Mechner getting a start there. And it's it Mechner or Mechner? I thought maybe you knew. I think it's probably Mechner. I honestly don't know. I've never met the man and I've never heard anyone professional who knows him say his.

and Will Wright. So yeah, Mechner and Will Wright, and all these interesting people who went on to do great things were just some of the people basically picked up off the street, more or less, by Broderbund. I think Will Wright was sitting on the street

riding games. Probably, yeah, maybe. Just like, you know, we'll code for food. A lot of these people were essentially at the hobbyist level at that time. You know, they were like, it was like kind of what became the shareware scene

later on where you just code something up and show it around to people. And, you know, maybe you could sell a few copies, and that'd be great. And, you know, some of these people reading the history, they would try to, they would just literally, like, walk into a computer store and say, I wrote a game, do you want to sell it? Right.

Well, that's what Ritterbund did for a while. Right, right. Well, Roderbund walked in trying to push what they were publishing, but also original artists would come in and be like, how do I sell my game? And, you know, in some lucky instances, someone passed them on to a place like Roderbun that could actually have the resources to shepherd them to completion and get them out the door and install. Yeah, a lot of the history we have from Breakout by David Craddick.

And so I don't want to just like rehash everything. in that book, but there is some great info there. From the very beginning, Bruderbund was, like, their success and their fortunes were tied to a Japanese game publisher, which, you know, that was something that would become very prevalent in the mid-80s, you know, especially once Nintendo made a foothold in the U.S. But at the time, that was still something kind of new. Like you had arcade importers like Midway and Stern and Gremlin bringing over Japanese-made games and you had Nintendo kind of establishing itself as its own, its own entity in the U.S.

But the collaboration between American and Japanese publishers didn't really happen that much. But it was basically a Japanese corporation or a small company called StarCraft, no relation, that kind of propelled Bruderbund into success. Because in the beginning, Bruderbund was making games for TRS-80, which, you know, that had, it had its fans. It was a very affordable system. It was also a very poorly made system to keep costs down with low, low quality parts, hence the nickname Trash 80. But they found that there just wasn't much success to be had by peddling software releases for TRS80.

But they went to a convention, a trade show in San Francisco, and their booth was next to a Japanese company called StarCraft, who had Apple IIs. And they had brought an Apple II along. and StarCraft was making I believe like Galaxian clones and things like that Real Time strategy games No not real start strategy games That was Bruderbund

And those were not very exciting to look at Very arcadey stuff Which was kind of unusual still Yeah it's funny because Bruterbund made the first 4X game In Galactic and Myers So then yeah so then they teamed up with StarCraft Which is kind of like the

The king of that genre So there is kind of like this funny little bit of connection there that's totally incidental. But basically they said why don't you guys show your Apple II games that are really cool on the computers at our booth and that'll draw people over

and then, you know, people started to take an interest in the flashy Apple II games that were playing and then they would see, you know, Galactic Empire and that sort of thing. And so Bruderben began distributing StarCraft games in America and then they started making their own Apple II

games and from there they just kind of changed their business model and they really took off when they started releasing games like choplifter and load runner and so forth do you know the names of any of those starcraft games for the apple too um i don't know let's see i'm wondering if i'm i don't think i wrote it down um there's alien rain um yeah i mean it was basically galaxia which was a galaxian clone and they changed the name to be alien rain yeah you know because they're raining bullets on yeah yeah it's like chocolate rain but with aliens i may have had that for my Apple 2.

Yeah, and it was, and like this was kind of the niche that this Japanese company, Starcraft, had fallen into, is like really pushing the boundaries of getting arcade-looking stuff working on an Apple 2. Because, you know, the original Apple 2 was not, you know, kind of, it was not known for action-oriented stuff. Like, yeah, I mean, we talked about how Steve Wozniak was like, I want to be able to play breakout on this computer. And so there was like the capabilities for generating graphics and fast action were there. but no one really kind of locked it down until. Yeah, it wasn't easy. You had to really learn the hardware to figure out how to squeeze this stuff out of it. Right.

And I think this really gets to kind of, you know, something that was advantageous for Bruderbund, you know, like not not hooking up, but making this connection with a Japanese developer or publisher. Because there is this great element of discipline in Japanese game design and development from that era. where you would really see them push the technical limits of a system. And you saw that, you know, with American and European publishers, too. But it was always a little bit of a different vibe that you got from Japanese programmers and developers. Yeah. Well, they're a different culture, obviously. Yeah.

Change. They're different mythology and stuff, different expectations. I don't know about mythology, but definitely like a different, just a different system. And so they would push computers. in a different way than like, you know, people who would do European demo scene coding. So I think that really helped Bruderbund establish themselves here with something that was unique. And like no one else really had that on Apple 2. So as this computer platform started to explode, they were there and they had the advantage of this great licensing deal with StarCraft.

It was good for StarCraft because they were able to sell their games to thousands and thousands of Americans that they wouldn't otherwise have access to. It was great for Bruterman because they had a really good licensing deal and they were making money off of it. And it made them look very attractive. And so then people started coming to Bruterman and saying, you know, again, like we have these ideas. Can you help us? And they would cherry pick and say, this is a great idea. Let's go. All right. So that's basically the origin story of Bruderbund.

But why don't we talk about the... I don't know that there's that much more to talk about in terms of its history, aside from the fact that they made games for a long time. And then in the late 80s or late 90s, the learning company came along. And the learning company was basically, I think that was who it was. Well, there was actually some shell company that owned the learning company, I think, that ultimately acquired them and kind of munged all the properties around between the two of them. Well, they were purchased by the learning company, which was, yeah, I think they were owned by a bigger conglomerate. But it was basically one of those cases of consolidation where companies were going around saying, who has hop properties, let's acquire them, get rid of the workforce.

and, you know, parcel out the intellectual properties. So obviously, you know, with the MIST franchise under their belt, Bruderbund was very attractive because in 1998 they had just come out with Riven. And it was a big deal. Missed Three Exile was on the way out. Like it was very exciting. It was going to sell really well. So, yeah, that would make them a very attractive target.

So the learning company or whoever owned of them came in and said, great. And then I think laid off like half of the Bruderbund workforce. And then, like a year or two later, they sold off the gaming properties to Ubisoft, which is why Ubisoft, I think they did great things with, like, Prince of Persia Sands of Time. And the missed games that they put together were actually really good, the final two games in the series. Some of the franchises did quite well. Like, it wasn't bad that Ubisoft got a hold of these games, but it does really suck for everyone who worked at Bruderbund and lost their jobs as a result. And then their desktop properties were given to Riverdeep, who, I don't know if they still hold those properties or if it's some other company, but they keep Bruderbund's name alive as an imprint for, I want to say, calendar creator. Yeah.

Which is, yeah, which debuted in 1995 and is up to version 12 something now at this point. Wow. And is still being sold under the Bruderbund League. Yeah, and there's some other edutainment and utility software that still uses the brand. pretty far divorced from the original context at this point. So let's look back at Bruderbund's history of making applications, not software and video games and not computer games. We'll talk about their applications first because they did kind of,

I don't know, they got their start making video games, but I feel like they made their first big impression on me. I talked about Lod Runner, but before that there was the print shop, like everyone who was in elementary school in the 80s. and maybe into the 90s is like, oh, yes, the print shop. I know the print shop. It was everywhere.

Everyone who had a computer had the print shop. So, yeah, I don't know. Looking over their applications, like even the ones that aren't video games, they're still very closely tied to video games. Their first big software creation, non-game software creation,

was called Arcade Machine. And it was basically Super Mario Maker before their Super Mario Maker. It was a, I've never used it myself, but it was apparently pretty big. pretty successful. It came out right around the same time as Bill Budge's pinball construction set. And it was the same sort of idea. Like, here are the tools. You can make simple video games. And maybe because they had, you know, kind of gotten their start with

licensing Alien Rain from StarCraft. They kind of made this software default to creating Galaxian-style shooters. Yeah, I've played some games made with that. Like on the Atari 800 or something that's made with arcade game creator. And I think they're all shooter games, the ones I played like the, like Galaxian kind of Yeah, I mean, I did look at a gallery of games that had been made with, with arcade machine. And you could do something other than shooters, but I definitely think that was sort of the default. Like, you can do things with Super Mario Maker that aren't just, you know, run and jump to the end of the level of platformers. But you kind of have to work at it.

So I think it was the same sort of thing. but it was it was highly acclaimed at the time like reading through old reviews of it people were like this is this is genius like this in pinball construction set yeah like all the sudden you are the video game creator you you can get infinite replay out of this because you're making the games yourself yeah I mean for back then even just being able to you know change it to your own graphics and like change the behavior of things even if even if it was hard to do a lot with the underlying game structure I mean that was huge yeah I mean back then you had to like learn basic or basic or pro-dos in order to program and do all these like calls and you know if and conditional statements and I don't like I'm terrible at programming so it was always just beyond me well and even even beyond that I mean things like if you're starting from scratch things like using the tiny amounts of memory that were in all these machines without immediately running out is was you know serious low level stuff yeah I think I think as long as there are video games there will be a market for applications and tools that allow you to create video games even if even if they're

rudimentary something like warrior wear DIY where you're making games that are like five seconds long like that's still really cool and you know you you you learn a lot in the process like what what are the what are the what are the processes here and so this was a great step this arcade makers it's sort of like one of the first game engines it's a lot like you know making the tools like unreal engine that people could use to develop games. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, yeah, it's definitely more simplistic than that. But, yeah, like, it's a move in that direction.

You know, you would see, like, a big part of Doom's popularity in the 90s was that it was so easy to modify by design. Like, Ed said, we need to make this game, you know, this platform for people to customize and create their own levels and their own graphics. And that kind of open platform, even something like Minecraft is huge because it does allow that element of creativity of personal customization. I'll also hit this again

when we talk about the games because Load Runner one of the first things to come with an editor. Yep. Yeah, and a lot of their applications are really, they're very much designed around creativity

and self-expression. 1984, Bruderbund released a program called Dazzle Draw, which was basically like a very affordable Apple 2-based take on MacPay The extremely successful, was MacPaintiff built into the Macintosh? No, I think you had to buy it separately.

It depended on what area you were buying in. I think sometimes it was bundled and sometimes it wasn't. Yeah, I mean, but it was extremely popular. Right. Well, MacPaint was a big deal because it was a paint app that took advantage of the Macintosh and let you use a mouse to paint with. Of course, you know, bringing that back into the Apple 2, you're getting a different kind of platform. But taking that the ideas and the elements and even like the menu-driven

elements of of Mac paint and saying now you can have that on Apple 2 also like that was very compelling and doing some research about it believe it or not I was just using dazzle draw yesterday were you Apple 2C yeah I used it as a demonstration in my garage with the computers in it because it's a really neat vivid way to use the Apple 2C because it utilizes the Apple 2C's extended color mode that a lot of programs don't take advantage of so interesting and it's got a great It's really smoothly, well-written and stable. Well, why don't you... I'm sitting here talking about, like, I've researched this.

You've used it. So don't let me jabberj off for a while. And I think MacPaint did ship with Macintosh at first. I was back with Mac Wright and MacPaint and stuff. But, yeah, in 1984, when Apple launched the Macintosh, they also launched the Apple 2C, and they launched it with a mouse, too, to tie into their mouse-related stuff. And they had a program called Mouse Paint that was like Mac Paint, but for the Apple II.

And so Dazzle Draw is definitely many steps up. It has better tools like a spray paint tool that's really nice. It's got all kinds of zooming tools. And just the colors are amazing and vivid on that. And it runs this like double high-res mode on the Apple 2C that has all these colors. And I mean, it works really well. I love to play around with it. and I let my kids draw on it.

And I wouldn't be surprised if people used it to develop games as an art editor because it was really high quality. Graphics to import into arcade machine. Or anything, like another game on the Apple 2. Yeah, another compelling thing about arcade machine is that it was like 50 bucks, whereas other paint applications were $100, $200, they were a lot more expensive. This was, you know, there was no standardization for software pricing back then. So kind of coming in with a very versatile.

capable application that cost half as much as any other application on the market, like that's a very compelling set of features. So I can see where that was very successful for you. Yeah, applications tended to be way up there, especially compared to games at the same era. I was pretty sure I was reading Alien Rain was like $20, $20 of the StarCraft game. But yeah, applications would range way up from there. Right.

And at the same time in 1984, they also released the print shop, which was ubiquitous in the 80s. Like every computer lab had the print shop. Most people who owned a computer at home had the print shop. It allowed you to make cards, banners, posters, flyers. It was basically maybe the original desktop publishing program. And obviously not a patch on something like InDesign or Quark Express. But, I mean, you know, for the capabilities of the computer at the era, back when the Macintosh, which was the desktop publishing machine,

was first peering on the market, But here was a program that for a very inexpensive price, if it was probably like $100 or so, would allow you to do a lot of the things that Apple was promising you could do on Macintosh. On an Apple, too, which millions of schools had already, you know. And it's the capability is not just of the machine, but also of the printer. Because, you know, you'd have all this detailed Macintosh high density of pixel graphics, but most people just had a little dot matrix printer.

and the resolution on that is really low and that's what print shop was specifically targeted at was this combination of the Apple 2 and a dot matrix printer to makes and it came with stuff that would look good on it and so you had layouts that were designed to come out at the resolution of those printers that again every school had

yeah and I remember like sitting there for five minutes while you print out a banner that just kept going I think you said on the tractor feed paper like just keeps going and going yeah the loud dot matrix running away at it but it's an advantage of that kind of printer is that you have that because because the paper comes in a continuous feed right and it had all this clip art in it so you could like decorate the banner it wasn't just words like it allowed you to kind of spruce things up it was a little bit of a creativity application a little bit of

practical application but it had so many uses I have a few stories about the print shop yeah which is I found some old cards that my dad made with the print shop for me and my brother as kids for Halloween and stuff that had the Halloween clip art, you know, and he'd print it out in a Christmas one. And I still have them. I've scanned them and put them on vintage computing as one of the retroscans over the years. And as I mentioned to Jeremy before this, that my soccer coach as a kid would use this for calendars. They had a calendar thing or you could put little icons on the calendar and, you know, for schedules and the teachers would use it for calendars and oh man it was amazing but one of the

most interesting things about the print shop i think was about this is about 10 years ago um somebody contacted me their father had passed away and they wanted some sort of really computer like um art or something to display at the funeral and it was she was trying to figure out what it was that they used to do to make these banners you know and it and it had to have snoopy on on it or something. And I figured out it was the print shop. And I think I made a banner for her to use. And she printed it out herself somehow. This is a long time ago. But that's the cultural impact of this program. That it was so, you know, it was associated with that her father's identity somehow as a computer guy. And, you know, at his own funeral, they wanted a print shop

banner there. So that's really something. Yeah, that's awesome. Um, it was just, you know, it was such a pervasive part of, of computing. And it's not video gameish related. But to me, it's all tied up to that, that era where everything on the computer was just cool, whether it was a video game or you were just farting around in an art program or making. Or just farting. Yeah, I don't know. I didn't do a lot of that. But, um, but, um, but, you know, just making little things to hand out for your classmates or whatever. Like, it was all fun and it was new and it was exciting. And the print shop really captured that. For every occasion, there's the print shop. Exactly. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, bar mitzvahs, funerals. Funerals, yeah. Classrooms.

One of the other interesting tidbits I came across looking at a history from the print shop is that it was also apparently the subject of one of the industry's first look-and-feel lawsuits. So there's this company, I don't really know anything about, called Unison, who came to Brutabund wanting to do a DOS version of this. And for some reason, the deal fell through. But they just basically went ahead and did it anyways. And so then there was this lawsuit of can you make software that basically looks exactly like someone else's software,

but you tried to write it somewhere else and do the same thing. And so, you know, that became the basis of a whole lot of drama in the computer industry going forward. Yeah, that happened a lot with Apple and Microsoft. When people wanted to make a port and they didn't get permission. Right. Just do it anyways. Just like Commander Keene got started as a Mario. Like Alien Rain, which was pretty much Galaxium?

Which was pretty much Galaxian. There's a lot of this. Yeah, Bruderbund definitely wasn't innocent of that themselves. No, no. No one was. Once you kind of have your hit, then all of a sudden you become a little protectionist of it. So, yeah, it's kind of the drawback. But, yeah, we all become our worst enemies or whatever.

But still, print shop was great. And it had kind of an offshoot a few years later called the Banner Shop, which, or Banner Mania. Banner Mania. And that was pretty much like the banner element of the print shop. blown up and made into itself. And I don't know, maybe that's actually how I remember someone printing out the tractor feed banners,

but I thought you could do that with printshy. No, you can do it on printshy. It's just you could do it better with banner mania. But the last sort of original, kind of innovative piece of software, I think that Bruderbun put together was, crap, where do my notes go? Calendar?

Fantavision. Which is not the same as the Fantavision you know and love on PlayStation 2. It was a vector-based animation program. that I had never heard of until I was researching this, but it sounds like something I would have loved as a kid. Yeah, I never came across either. You worked with vectors and like anchor points and stuff

and sort of scripted how they would move together. And yeah, you couldn't do like rounded objects, but still like doing these kind of simple animations of figures or objects or things flying through the air. That would have been really cool. Like you could do your own simple primitive rendition of, money for nothing. I don't know. Extra simplified. Yeah, I've never heard of...

It didn't take off like some of their other stuff did, so you just didn't find it. Yeah, I've never heard of Fantavision, but it looks... It sounds cool. Yeah, like, I saw some demos that had been made in it, and it's very simplistic, but again, this was 1985. Yeah. So being able to do that on an Apple 2 in 1985, wow, that would have been crazy. Yeah. I feel like I really missed out by not having a computer in the 80s. Yes, obviously I did, but Yeah, so kind of

after Fantavision, I feel like Bruderbund's application output became sort of recursive. Like they weren't really doing much that was new and different. They had Banner Mania. They had arcade game construction kit, which was basically an upgrade to the arcade

machine that was designed for Commodore 64. And I feel like their business model kind of shifted more and more towards C64 over the course of the 80s as that became sort of the big, widespread, mainstream, consumer-facing computer platform. But I kind of feel like they got a second wind in the early 90s when they started moving into edutainment.

You had things like The Playroom in 1991, which was kind of, you know, almost like a scum adventure game, but instead of being an adventure game, it was more of like click and point and, you know, look and see what's in this room and have little stories of. about it and that sort of thing, like very simple, but with an educational value, and it basically was make a learning fun kind of thing. But at the time, it was new and fresh, and I feel like it would have been a very good way to draw children into learning to read and learning to, you know, deal with things like shapes and colors and all that stuff with a fun computer interface. And then they started a series called Living Books, which were interactive storybooks, which,

you know, that's a pretty well-worn idea at this point, but they were one of the first publishers to put that out there and they licensed up some pretty big properties including Dr. Seuss, the Berenstain Bears, that's AI, not E.I. And yeah, are you sure about that? I'm positive. You're suffering the Mandela effect. And then finally, the calendar creator in 1995, which was exactly what it says in the box, an application for creating calendars. And again, that is still sold in this day and age. you can go down to the...

Actually, you don't even have to go to the store. You can buy it online. It's crazy. What will be learning? Go down to your internet store. That's right. So yeah, that's still around. That's the sort of lasting legacy for Bruderbund.

So there always be a need to create a calendar, I guess. I guess so. And that was pretty much it. Like, that was, those were sort of their big learning and productivity applications. I feel like why people really love Bruderbund and the reason our patron sponsor, probably wants us to talk about Bruderbund is to talk about video games. So we're going to take a quick break and we'll come back and we will talk about video and computer games by Bruderbund, Broderbund, or Broderbund? Take your pick.

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All right. So I put out a call for people to send us cool stuff about Bruderbund, their memories and questions and comments and concerns and so on and so forth, and they delivered. So from Kyle Nickerson, these are probably mostly focused around video game aspects of the company's catalog. but I'm sure it ranges further afield. Let's find out. Kyle Niggerson,

I just wanted to give a shout out to the Sega Master System version of Chop Lifter, which I consider to be the best version of the game. That one was probably developed by Sega, as my guess, because the arcade game was. Yeah, it's probably part of the arcade. Controls are smooth and responsive. The game looks better than any other port I have seen,

and the music and sound are both very enjoyable. From what I understand, this is actually a port of a Sega developed arcade adaptation of the Bruderbund original. That could explain the difficulty, which seems to exponentially increase after the first level. I honestly can't bring myself to play when other versions, most other versions to compare it, though. It just doesn't feel right to play another version when Sega

nailed it. Yes, we talked about that one on the Sega Arcade episode. It's a good. I love obscure ports or in this case, maybe not obscure, but just alternative ports. It's like a, it's bordering obscurity. I'd say alternative ports. Yes. Like I have favorite versions of game song that 7,800 that nobody plays. From Joe Drilling. As someone who didn't own a computer until the mid-90s, most of my memories of Bruderbund are as a publisher of offbeat Japanese games on the NES. We didn't know that at the time, of course, but they brought us

games from Compile, Falcom, and more. In fact, if nothing else, I'll always be grateful that they brought the Zelda shoot-em-up marriage, the Guardian legend, to our shores. And yeah, that cover art has nothing to do with the game, but it looks badass. What's the panel's feeling on Bruderbun's NES output? Well, I think that is a question that demands

its entire section. Let's get to that. I love it. We'll circle back. From Kevin Byer. Boyer. I wanted to say thanks to Bruderbund for publishing the Battle of Olympus and the Guardian legend here in the U.S. The first is a fairly new pickup for me, the second and old favorite, recently repurchased. I'm only sad that some of the purchase money didn't go to the publisher that brought the titles here. From Claybot Uno. Among many cherished memories of the Big Bee are my fond recollections of playing Earhart on Apple 2. I don't know that one. The game ran well, not the case for all software on my Apple 2GS.

It looked awesome with small detailed animations and artwork, physics that made sense, probably pushing the capabilities of Apple II, I suspect, and a sense of adventure and mystery and fluid arcade gameplay, one didn't frequently find on Apple II games of that era. Watching videos of it now, it certainly doesn't look as good as I remember, which is always a hazard of retro gaming, but the open-ended exploration across a seemingly massive open-sea map does in fact remind me of a rudimentary sort of Zelda the Wind Waker, a mysterious hero sailing across a vast sea solving puzzles and battling enemies. I had a ton of fun with this game.

Any mention of Bruderbund would not be complete without also mentioning the almighty print shop. I shudder to think how many forests were felled by children printing four-foot Matthew's bedroom stay-out banners or ridiculously low-res birthday cards for our moms. Ah, the fun of desktop publishing was upon us. And finally, a PC gaming question for Benj. Do you know where my copy of Zini Golf for Apple 2GS got to? I've been looking everywhere. Yeah, I have it.

Oh, see? Good thing he asked. I'll hook you guys up after. Was that published by book? I don't think it was. I think that was just an unrelated question. So from Mike Mariano, Bruderbund might hold the record for distributing pound for pound.

The most Feeleys were their software. All thanks to the New American Desk Encyclopedia packaged with where in time is Carmen San Diego. The encyclopedia was a single volume paperback but was still hundreds of pages of reference material with no obvious connection to a video game. Decades later, This encyclopedia still sits on a bookshelf in my parents' house,

even if it's days of temporal crime fighting are behind it. And I did pick up a copy of Where in Time is Carmen San Diego for NES, complete with the giant ass encyclopedia, published by Konami in the U.S. I picked that up last year at Midwest Gaming Expo, and I had to carry it home in my suitcase, and that was stupid. I remember seeing that sitting around and I was impressed. Sitting around here?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. Here. Okay. Retronauts. Headquarters. Retronauts H.Q. Yeah. And sunny, Raleigh, North Carolina. From Zach Adams.

My first brush with Bruder Bund as a publisher was in late 1982 and early 83. When ads and reviews for Choplifter, oh, he put the exclamation point at the end. That's very good. I admire that. Thank you, Zach Adams. And Lodrunner started showing up in electronic games and other less memorable magazines. I thought they looked exciting, but our Commodore 64 was not something we were allowed to game on. That's what the Atari was for.

I pretty quickly discern from reviews that Bruder Bruder which I called borderbound and somehow thought their logo was moose antlers or something. I can see that. Awesome. Made some of the best things on the shelves. A friend had an Apple 2 with most of their games, and I thought they were really cool, but a little advanced for six-year-old me. Still, when the 2,600 was finally and truly dead for a while at retail,

and the computer game prohibition lifted, we looked unsuccessfully for those in other games. When we got an ES in 1887, my brother and I sought out everything they made, and, aside from Spalunker, they didn't steer us wrong. Load Runner Battle of Olympus and Guardian legend were all things we rented endlessly until they made Christmas lists. And we were even briefly excited for the U-Force until it became apparent that even the Power Glove was better. I forgot that Bruderbund did the U-Force.

Oh, yeah. I didn't realize that. All right, here we go with an application mail. Matthew Green says Bruderbun's the print shop for Commodore 64 was a revelation for my family when I was a kid. We printed greeting cards for all occasions and I loved cranking out signs. banners used too much paper to print often, sadly. Funny how printing your own greeting cards was such a time and money saver back then.

But later programs for Windows require special card paper, and of course, the modern era brought us DLC themes and Adelaideon E-cards. Suddenly, those old basic black-and-white print shop cards look pretty good. And finally, from James Irish. My most frequent encounters with Bruderbund were the Carmen San Diego games, which I played frequently in the sixth grade, and was one of the few highlights of a tough year for me, moving into a new town and adapting poorly to a new school.

I eventually got wear in the USA for PC for my birthday from my grandmother the first year we had a computer, though she thought it was for my dad and accidentally gave me his Christmas gift, Limnings at first, and I played it so much, I memorized the clue to a degree where I could fly through the early cases fairly quickly, but still never caught Carmen herself. When the CD era arrived, my dad picked up missed when it came out, and was determined to beat the game. I tried it a couple of times and was utterly flummoxed by it and figured it was way too complex for me. I think it was too complex for him as well, since the hint book he got with the game did develop some creases in the spine eventually. But he did eventually be.

All right. So that is the collective memories that the retronauts community shares for Bruderbun's games. And it sounds like they all kind of hit the big titles. But Bruderbun's PC and console software was actually quite a bit further ranging than that. It goes all the way back to 1980. And we kind of touched on this, but there's some really great, like, cornerstone-type video games in this set of games. Did you guys ever play Galactic Empire by chance? Or does that kind of predate you?

It rings a bell, but I did not have a TRS-80 until I was a teenager. Yeah, I'm old, but I was... I may be old, but I was four years old when that game came out. So it was a little bit beyond me. And yeah, we never had a TRS-80. I think they did port the games to Apple. They did port it later. Once they switched up on Apple.

I don't think I ever saw it running on Apple Tews at school or anything. It's not really the sort of thing you could just sit down for a minute after you'd finished your work. The original, the original TRS 80 doesn't have bitmap graphics capabilities. It just says character graphics. So it was never appealing to me to even try to play games on that. But, you know, this was a strategy game. It was a simulation. I mean, it was like I said earlier, the first, arguably the first 4X game, which is expand, exterminate, explore, and.

Exploit, I think. Exploit, yeah. Exploit the resources. I probably got those all out of order, too. totally out of order. But, you know, that's pretty much the standard for, you know, StarCraft in games like that now. Spread, mind, conquer, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So, so it's a really kind of a landmark game. So actually, the, the Galactic Empire games were multiple parts. There were, it was a saga and Galactic Empire is the name of the saga. I don't know the

individual titles. I thought Galactic Empire was the 4X game in the Galactic saga. Oh, is that it? I think that's what it says. I don't know. I'm a little fuzzy on this one, I admit, Because it's really kind of an early creation and not a genre that I know that well. And it was one of the few games written entirely by one of the founders of brother and one of the brothers. Did we even give their names? I don't think we did. I said Doug and Gary, but I didn't name their sister, Kathy, and their last name was Carlston. I feel bad about that.

Yes. Doug Gary and Kathy Carl. So I believe this was Doug's baby, basically, is what he had started working on when you decided to get into trying to sell computer software. Right. Yeah, I don't think these are necessarily games that would hold up well that you'd want to play now. But, I mean, they predate Mule. So, like, these are really, like, it's a sort of, wow, you know, like somewhere along the lines of Akhala Beth or something. First in the genre. There may have been a 4x game that predated this called Empire, which was a turn-based war game created around 1971 from mainframe computers. So that inspired. I mean, sure, there's always, there's always some sort of precursor, but that was not a commercial product that you could buy. Yeah, true. Yeah. Not at the time anyway.

So in terms of, yeah, computer-facing games. They may have been inspired by that, the brothers. It could be. Although, from what it said in the Craddock book, they didn't really have, they didn't have the academic computing background that most people do. Doug Carlston was a lawyer in Chicago and was like, ah, I hate the big city. So he moved out to, like, Maine, and became a lawyer in a small town. and basically kept getting ripped off by a bunch of rednecks. So I was like, I can't keep doing this as a business.

So he just kind of got into computing because it seemed like an opportunity. Doing in a spare time. Whereas, yeah, most people who, you know, kind of established video game companies in the late 70s, early 80s, like they came from academic backgrounds, like the guys, the implementers for Zork who created Infocom. That's because that's where the computers were. You know, you had access to a mainframe when you were in an academic setting. And so you would mess around a spare time.

Yeah, but Bruder-Bund was, one of the first, I think, companies that really represented people from the outside of the computer community saying there's money to be made here. There's a, there's possible. Well, because, because right here, right about here in 1980 was when you started to have personal computers being more widespread. So it was no longer just mainframe. So we had Apple 2. You had the Apple 2. Right, yeah, TSA 80, the VIC20.

And so you could have people who didn't have access to a mainframe still having in their downtime a computer around to play around on. And that's where a lot of these things got started. So, yeah, they were, they were part of a. like the big wave of computers. And I think they got in right at the right time to really be successful and make a mark. So their next game was less inventive than Galactic Empire.

And that was Apple Panic, which was an Apple-based, Apple 2-based rip-off of Space Panic, which was a game by Universal that basically took, that's right, Hey, Ankio Alien, and turned it into a side-scroller. And you can really see the roots here for Load Rudder, honestly.

Yeah. I mean, it's different because the trapping works a little differently, but you drill holes and trap people in them, and you can fall through the holes. You have a shovel, I think. Yes. But it's very similar in spirit to Load Runner, but it's more of a point mission.

I think you're trying to get rid of all the robots or something. Yeah, it's more condensed. It's just the single mechanic is trying to get the things into the holes. Apple Panic was one of the first Apple II games I ever played when I got my Apple 2 back in 90. And so I have about five copies of it because it was very commonly pirated, you know, so, but I was surprised later on that, I mean, I was surprised at the time. I was like, man, this is just like a load runner because I had already played that on the Atari. So anyway, precursor.

That's awesome. All right. So their first big, I would say, like really innovative and really successful game came in 1982 with Choplifter, which again, we've talked about on the Sega episode. But it's worth mentioning again Just because it does take a different approach to the shoot-em-up It's not a game about destroying everyone It's really far more focused on search and rescue And you get points for blowing up enemy ships

But what you're really trying to do is rescue hostages Oh, don't you? No, in the original game, it does not keep track of any The only thing it keeps track of is the hostages Okay, maybe I'm thinking of some of the later ones Some of the other ports might But the original game, I mean that was a specific thing the guy did is he didn't. So this was, this was

an early example, again, of them picking up just, you know, someone with a good idea and shepherding it to conclusion. So, the someone in this case was Dan Gorlin? Yeah, yeah, I didn't have his name here, but yeah, Dan Gorlin. So he had, he was in, you know, another one of these guys who had just been messing around computers

in his spare time, and he had made this, like, helicopter animation with seeing what he could do with it. And he's like, yeah, I could do a shooter, but there's lots of shooters out there, so we should do something else. And that's about when Broder Brum brought him on. And so they started working on this concept of, you know, the main thing is going to be, this is a story about rescuing the hostages. And so it made it into, again, this is their theme sort of doing a different twist on things.

It occurs to me that, you know, the Vietnam War loomed heavily in everyone's minds at the time, even though it wasn't going on or anything. But there were lots of veterans around. I mean, so much of early 80s media is a response to the Vietnam War and like the fallout. G.I. Joe was all like Vietnam vets. Rambo, you know, first blood. Yeah, Rambo. Like, there was so much of that in the media. Yeah, so I think, you know, choplifter may have been inspired by that.

Those hella, those meta-chopper, whatever the term is for it, they would come in and get the people who are injured out of the battlefield. And that was a Vietnam innovation, as far as I know. I thought that was Korean War, because there sure was a lot of that in Nash. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Incoming enemy wounded. Yeah, totally. All personnel.

Helicopters? Yeah. Yeah, they were. They had the little beds on the side. But still, I see what you're saying. Like, they, they had mobile bases that they would take, you know, rescue choppers. If I think of, like, you know, my own mashed up version of the Vietnam War in my head from what I've seen on TV, they always show those medical guys coming in with their helicopter and picking up. Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

I'm not at all saying, like, there was no specter of Vietnam looming over this game. It probably was. And, you know, the fact that it was very much like a game centered on rescuing people as. opposed to gunning down the enemy, really gave it a different personality, and I think a more meaningful tone than something like galaxium. It's striking how different it is from, you know, even though you're in a flying thing and you're shooting at things, it's striking how different it is from other shooters of the time. And like you're surprisingly, I mean, I think partly because this started out as a demo of

trying to realistically animated helicopter, you're surprisingly maneuverable and you can aim at things on the ground and at things in the sky, even though you're just a side scroll you're not like fixed into one like one direction um yeah i mean the the the way it kind of imitates the dynamics of a helicopter is really interesting because yeah yeah i mean you know helicopter yeah it rotates but it's also like you can aim up and down um and it really it really does kind of capture the the the weird unique movement of a helicopter versus an airplane or a spaceship like how does a spaceship even they just go in circles around the planet what year was defender Defender was 80, I think.

80 or 81. Yeah, so this was post-defense. And, yeah, and then it has a lot of similarities. Yeah, it has a lot of similarities in that you have this continuous horizontal plane that you're going back and forth on and that you're rescuing people. But the mechanics of it really kind of mix it up in that you can, you know, you can strafe the ground and you can aim up. And you have to land.

And you have to actually land to let people on. Defender definitely has the element of rescuing people, but it's really not so much about like rescuing and retrieving people so much as just preventing the aliens from getting a hold of the people. And there's no base to take them back to. That's what makes, I think chop lift are so interesting is

that you do have a base that you're trying to return to. And that adds a lot of challenge. And you have a capacity in a helicopter so you can only fill it up so much you have to go back and offload, yeah. And also the people are very vulnerable. You can't just like land on top of them because you will squish them. That's bad. You don't want to do that. You have to land next to them. So

then as they run over to you, you're vulnerable to enemy aerial attack. Yeah, so then you know, you have enemies approach. You have to take off again and take care of them and then land again carefully to let more people on. Yeah, it's a game that really puts you at a disadvantage. And in the way that, you know, like something like Pac-Man does, you still have a gun. But to play the game properly, you really have to put yourself out there and make yourself

vulnerable. And to really maximize your score, you have to get as many people into the helicopter at once as you can. And if you get shot down, then that's really bad because you lose the, the opportunity to rescue all those people. They all die with your helicopter. Yikes. So anyway, a great game.

Yeah. Yeah. And this was one of the real successes. Like this ended up in a lot of places. I know it's getting ported to everywhere. Like a breakthrough game for them, probably. So, 1983, one of their big games was Serpentine, which I thought was going to be, when I first saw a mention of it, was going to be, like, you know, snake. But it's like snake meets Pac-Man.

It's really interesting. And you're not trying to trap the other snakes. You're trying to eat them from behind. Yeah, I love this game. It's like the competitive Oroboros game. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of, it's a maze-based game that plays off the popularity of Pac-Man. So there are dozens of games that are variations on maze games after Pac-Man,

especially on home computers. But this game, you are a sort of snake caterpillar kind of thing with body segments, and you have to, there are enemy ones of different lengths, and you have to sneak up from behind them and chomp up their bits, and you grow longer over time, and you can't let them get you from behind, or you can't run into them and there's frogs that come into it

they hop in and changes it. So I never came across this back in the day but I was watching a playthro and there's something about laying eggs seems like and then does I give you extra lives I couldn't tell quite what was going on. I swear the funny thing is I played this so many times I play this every year when I get up

my Atari 800 at Christmas and yeah there's just you're just the body segment dynamics is the main part of the game where you're getting longer and shorter. And you, oh, if you're longer than the enemies, you can eat them head-on, I think, if you're longer than them. That's what it's okay.

Because I saw someone eat someone else head-on. If you get a frog, you grow longer. I think that's the way it is. Yeah, that's definitely happened. Because there's another game I play all the time. And it's one of my favorite games, too, but I completely forgot what it was called on the Atari and Commodore and stuff. And Vic 20, it has, but it's another snake game where your body does grow longer

as you eat it kind of like a snake, and it's in a maze, too. But there are no enemies. you just have to avoid hitting your own tail. I love that game. It seemed like there's some interesting tradeoffs at play, and it says like, you want to get longer in order to... The longer you are, the more dangerous you are to them,

but you're also at greater risk because it's easier for them to grab your tail. For them to run into you. And it also, and like there's this eggling thing that seemed like maybe was a tradeoff where you sacrificed some length to maybe get an extra life

at the end of its stage or something. Yeah, I don't remember that for some reason. But... It's the gym, man. I just can't remember. I should have waited. All right. Well, now that we're drunk.

I'm not, fuck. I need three more. Yeah, actually, 1983 was a big year for Bruderbund. 1983, they also published Star Wars, which was a really good-looking PC conversion of the Atari game. I had never, I didn't realize this conversion existed, but I saw footage of it on YouTube when I was doing research, and I was like, that must be like some sort of fan game from later.

But no, like, it is Star Wars. It is a damn good conversion. of the vector game to, you know, the limitations of a personal computer. You know, somebody upload this to my BBS as a piece of wares, you know. You know, I didn't know it was a pirated game at the time, because it was really old in the early 90s. And it just said Star Wars, and I played it.

And I was like, man, this is exactly like the arcade game. It's incredible. It looks like a vector thing. Yeah, I had a little trouble finding the exact, like the full provenance of this conversion. some sources say they published it in 83 some sources say it was 87 which maybe is more likely

because the arcade game out came out arcade game came out in 83 so I could see like a few years later than putting together a great conversion but in any case whoever did it was really talented it's a hell of a version I would have been blown away

if I had seen that version of the game running in someone's home in the 80s anytime in the 80s yeah that would have been amazing okay but they're big games in 80s First, there was Spolunker, Tim Smith's. Is that the name? No, Tim Martin, I think. Why does I say Tim Smith here?

I think I wrote that down because I was, like, falling asleep or something. I'm pretty sure his name is Tim Martin. It's his hateful classic. It is a game that lives in infamy, especially in Japan. Like the other game, we're going to talk about Load Runner. It was one of the early conversions to Famicom, like a very hot, you know, international PC hit being converted contemporaneously to Famicom, right? As people

were like, oh, yes, let's buy a Famicom and let's buy, you know, the dozen games that are available for Famicom. So everyone had one. Irim brought it over and everyone hates it, but they love it because it's really cruel and hard, but because they were kids and they had like

three games and they had to get their most out of their allowance, they played this game over and over again. So it has lived on an infamy, whereas Americans are kind of like, oh, yes, Belunker. Like all anyone cares about Spelunker now in America is that it gave us Spelunky through inspiration. But in Japan, they love

Spelunker. It is like you can buy merchandise all over the place. There's a company called Tozai, I think they picked up Spelunker and also Lod Runner and keep reissuing it. Square Inix just published last year I think what is it called

Spelunker Party? Which is like a four person cooperative Spelunker. And it keeps all the limitations. The idea is you're like a guy running around through cavernous mazes and if you fall from like two inches yeah like like two pixels higher than your actual height then you will die and there's things coming at you all the time you have to drop bombs and you get caught in your own bombs there's a spillunker hd on a PS3 and some other platforms it's like that it's just different graphics but yeah it's punishing

where you can't fall off a vine or whatever two inches or yeah and i love spalunker because it takes the essence of that and makes it way more playable and it also gives it that, you know, kind of. Spalunker. Spalunker. Spalunky. Yes. Yeah. God. Derek, you and your very close names to your property that you're homageing. I wanted to love Spelunker so much because it looked kind of like pitfall, which I was familiar with. And I bought an NES copy, but I guess I'm fortunate that it didn't work. I bought a used copy, you know, in the early 90s and it was broken, so I never played on the NES. You know, there's merit to the game. Like we're talking about

how hard it is and it is hard but you know it is it works according to very specific rules so once you learn the rules and you learn your limitations and boy do you have limitations then the game is i don't i assume it's beatable but at least it's you know playable and it's got like it's got pretty nice looking environments for the time you know yeah there's nicely rendered cavern there's lots of there's lots of uh diverse enemies and hazards like a ghost and a bat and just different things that kind of like appear where you don't expect them. But it takes a while to learn the game. And the first real encounter I ever had with Spalunker was at a Tokyo game show six, seven, eight years ago when they were showing off Spalunker HD for PlayStation 3. And you know, they have the demo stations set up like at E3. And there's a nice lady there who will hand you the controller and try to explain how to play the game in Japanese. And I was like, nah, Wakarnimasin. And just started playing and like went through my three lives at about 30. seconds. And there was this real look of pity in her eyes. And she took the controller away and was

like, hurry got to walk of shame. Yep. It was, it was shameful. It was really hard. I'm almost really intrigued by the sort of the back and forth in this era between the U.S. and Japan. So like, so like we were just looking at one of Jeremy's eBay pals downstairs over the break and has a copy of Spelunker for NES, which says prominently on the front of the box, you know, like million seller in Japan as a selling point. Sold half million in a half million in Japan. Yeah. So, but But, like, so, you know, this was originally, like, I assume it was on Apple II and stuff. Yeah. But, like, for selling it on Nintendo, you know, they didn't assume people knew about, like, the Apple II scene.

They're talking about how this is big in Japan. On the Famicom. And then it comes, and there's a lot in this era that, like, had this weird, like, random things from the U.S. with, like, catch-on big in Japan, and then we get them filtered back. I think maybe they didn't say, like, sold a million copies on Apple II, because then instead of buying it on an ES, why did you just go borrow it from your friend who has. copy on Apple 2 or copy their disc. I think they wanted to kind of like say like that ecosystem doesn't exist. Don't pay no attention to the personal computer behind the curtain.

But I think it's also because what you were saying, like there weren't a lot of options on Famicon yet at the time. Yeah, there are certain franchises that became American franchises, computer franchises that became really big on Famicom just because of timing. And Load Runner and Spalunker are two of the biggest beneficiaries of that timing. And Load Runner would become even bigger than Spillunker. It has that like Kuso Gay nostalgia. Like people hate it. They're like, this is the worst game. It's crap.

I hate it, but I love it. Whereas Lodrunner, like, it was a genuine success. And they kept like, Irim. Well, let's see, Hudson made the first few games. And then Irim made like, I think they converted some of the sequels to Famicom disc system and started making their own. And then Hudson got it back. And they made like this crazy cubic version for GameCube. Yeah, it's always, it's always interesting to see these.

things filtered back. You have things that started in America, but then, like, spent this time in Japan where they were huge, and then we get, like, the results back. Like, you know, you had wizardry got huge, and then it filters back through JRP's. And, like, there's a whole bunch of this in that way. It's just fascinating. Yeah, Lodrunner always, like, filtered back in its original form, but the

NES version of the game was the one converted by Hudson, which Hudson said, hey, why do we tie this to Bomber Man? Yeah. So there's, like, a narrative link in that load runner to bomber man. Yeah. But there was a, the creator of Lodrunner died three or years ago, Doug Smith.

So I'm sad I never got to talk to him because I would have loved to have interviewed him about this game. But there was an interview with him on IGN back in the 90s, like 1998 or so when there was some sort of load runner game coming to like N64 or PlayStation. So they interviewed him and he said, yeah,

you know, this game was a big hit on Apple II but that's nothing compared to its success in Japan. Like it was a monster over there. And I feel like, you know, Broaderbund, Bruderbund, I can't even remember how to pronounce her name anymore. Licensing this game to Hudson was like one of the smartest things they did because Hudson, you know, a year after the PC game came out in America, brought to Famicom, this system

that was exploding over there in popularity. And so it just became like part of the DNA for gaming over there. And it tied back to Hayanko Alien. It has that same like trap-em-up element to it. Load Runner, of course, is a side-scrolling platformer, although it's only side-scrolling on Aeneas. On Apple 2, you can see the whole maze at one. the level. But your guy is very athletic. He can climb ladders. He can walk hand over hand across

these bars that are hanging. And your only ability is to drill holes in the ground. And so you can trap like the enemy robots or monks or whatever. And if the walls seal back over, the floor seals back over them, then they'll be destroyed and respawn someplace. And you're collecting gold from throughout the maze. And you can carry all the gold you can possibly get. But robots will also pick up gold. So if you collect all the piles of gold you can see, but you still can't leave the level, it's because one of the robots has it. So you have to figure out which one. You have to trap them. You have to cause them to drop their gold. And then you have to escape. And there's all these strategic elements to it. Like there are platforms that you can drill through, but if it's

more than one brick tall, you can't just drill down because you drill one step ahead of you. So you have to like drill kind of like a funnel. So you drill like if it's three thick, then you drill like three ahead of you, then two, on the next level down, and then you drop down again, and you drill one, and you can fall through that. Otherwise, you trap yourself, and the bricks will seal up over you. So there's a lot of strategy to it. It's one of the games that is the type that, you know, you have this set of simple rules, but then the way they interact gives you a lot of emergent possibilities. Good way to put it. That complexity from simplicity. And there's even more emergence to it because, as you mentioned. Right. There's a level

editor. It's one of the, one of the first widely distributed games that came with its own level editor. And again, because you had, you had these simple mechanics, but so many ways you can put them together. I mean, I think that was huge, making, letting people make their own levels. I mean, the original, the game as they published it came with a ton of levels. Um, but then you can just, you can just keep adding onto it. And they, they came out with different versions later. Championship load runner. Yeah. And I think championship load runner is actually the game that we got on NES in the US. Probably. I think there was a load runner and then championship load runner was converted and brought over. But yeah, it was just huge. And I think the game sold really well on NES. Like, I remember seeing

in stores for years. And as I mentioned earlier, that was one of the first NES games I bought because I was like, I can finally own Load Runner. That's so exciting. And I realized after I bought it like, oh, you know, games are bigger now. I have Super Mario Brothers. I have Metroid. So this is not that exciting. But I still just liked having it, you know, because it was, it was nostalgia from when I was a little kid, like three years before, the old days. Yeah, the Apple 2 one you played. Yeah, we played this on the Atari 800 and my brother was really good at it and it amazed me how he could avoid those robots and I always love the gold bars just something about human greed who loves gold bars you want to collect a little piles of gold yeah there's little triangles of yeah three

gold bars in a pile or something something that really fascinates me about load runner is that pretty much all the box art for every version of the game shows your little dude like shooting but you don't have a gun you have a drill to drill into the ground but they always are like no you're a guy with robots and you got a gun, but you don't. That's the whole point of the game is that you're extremely vulnerable. It's like Pac-Man with no energizers. Marketing departments could not conceive of a space dude in an arcade-style game that didn't have a gun.

Yep. Well, you want him to run around with a jackhammer instead? Yes, absolutely. Like Dig-Dug? I think so. It was good enough for Dig-Dug. It should be good enough for the load. Joe Runner.

Joe. Joe Runner. The load-runner. Right. So, yeah, that was, that was 83. for Bruderbund because they discovered two legendary video game designers, basically. Like, it's crazy, but one company

gave us both Jordan Mechner and Will Wright in the same year. Wow, that's crazy. And again, these were both guys who were just, you know, working on stuff and submitting it to places, and Bruder one was who saw them and picked it up. Yeah, they were like, yeah, we want these games. And both of them, I feel like,

were not amazing all-time classics on their own, but they paved the way for some of the most influential games that would both appear about five years later and would just be like, you know, they would change the industry. They would change the medium. So what should we start with? Yeah, why don't you talk about Carotica?

I have some history. I've played it on Game Boy, but you guys talk about it more. So this was one of the things that was on the Apple team machines in my school back in the day. So we had, you know, it was one of the ones, it's a pure game. it's just again it's it's you know punching people um so it's there's not much educational about it but there's kicking and kicking and kicking punching and forget the kicking yeah no it's a great it was a great it was a great system but it was so it was the thing that we could play after we had finished

our like edutainment and stuff whatever we were actually supposed to be doing at school um but it was great um so it's yeah it's this it's for the time it has a pretty dang detailed one-on-one combat system um with punching and kicking and the like there's a lot of really precise timing to it. And it looks just really good because Mechner did, this is where Mechner started his trademark rotoscope sprites where he just took photographs

that people doing stuff. I think it's his brother he's photographed. That was for Prince of Persia. I don't think in this one, that was the case. He may have done it in this one too. It wasn't as extensive, but I thought, well, he at least used photo references for it. Yeah, I must have. But yeah, this really, this really gets, okay, I'll call him up. This really gets into the beginning

of Mechner's fascination with classic cinema too because this is very much inspired by like chambara you know japanese uh movies where you know a lone martial artist goes into the enemy castle and has to fight through an endless succession of bad guys and like us people who grew up um on on consoles like probably a lot of your a lot of our listenership at retronauts um think of things like ninja gaden as being some of the groundbreaking like cinematic and they were for sure and they were and they were but but um this was really going in the same direction on on apple too and they had you know, it starts out with like, you know,

Bruderbun presents Jordan Mechner game, Carotica. It, like, has this set of titles. It even does, it even does like the cutaways. It does, yeah, it does, it does, it does, it does, it does, it does, it does, it does, it's like, it does, it'll be fighting and all of a sudden, you know, you, you beat a guy and walk through a door and then, there's a transition and you see, you see the daimyo or whoever he is, uh, Akuma, I think is his, yeah, yeah, there's, like sending,

sending out his little minions after you. So you get to see each minute you're going to fight because they come out, you know, you know, under Akuma's command. Yeah, and there's, and there's foreshadu. He has this bird on his shoulder the entire time. Every time there's a cinematic of him, he's got, he's in his big armor. He's got this bird perched on one of his shoulder pardrons. And then, like, at the end of the game, he sends out the bird.

Yeah, the only version of this I've played is Tose's conversion for Game Boy, which I could not finish. Like, it's crazy hard. It gives you the ability to allocate, allocate skill points at the beginning to, like, speed, power, endurance. And I can't find a good balance. that like you know some enemies you need to be really fast to be able to attack them first but some enemies you need like greater endurance to be able to hold up so yeah it's it's really hard um i mean i'll never see the end myself even in the original it's not an easy game like there's a lot of you know it's a fairly simple system but there's a lot of like very precise positioning and

timing you just you have to get a feel for each enemy to be able to get past i have a story about this which is yeah this is one of carotica is one of the first video games i ever played probably on apple two because my dad actually built an apple two e clone himself he got like a circuit board from somebody or made it and got all the parts and the schematic and you actually built it from scratch and this is when i was really little and and so we had carotico on that and it was just terrifying as a kid to see those guys with the horns running at you and i would just start running the other ways and you fall off a cliff but the music is is cool to too. It goes,

it's baked into my memory. And it has those great combat stances, too. Like you can exit combat and you can like bow to your enemy. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of really nice touch. Let me tell you, I found this so hard when I was three, four years old, you know, whatever this was. I played it when I was like 40 and I was like, oh, it's killing. I set this up just a year or two ago in my garage with an Apple 2C and I let my, four or five year old play at the time

and she just got so she got farther than I've ever been in the whole game like she beat the first three or four guys have you put her in like martial arts class she might be a natural my other my other kid tried martial arts on time but yeah I don't know maybe she'll try her yeah yeah it's

incredible but and I think it also matches with Broderburn's kind of philosophy of trying to trying to find new things and push what you could do in that in that they like to push You know, at this point in the mid-80s, we still think about this being kind of the era of arcady games, like games that are just like, here you are, shooting things. And Broderbrun really wanted to push into, you know, we can, even if it's going to be something very simple, we can present this as a story, as a narrative.

Well, there's definitely an arcade element to this game, but the way it's so meticulous and so fluid and cinematic, like, that's something you would not have seen in the arcade. It's like, I guess, you know, this did come out maybe a year after Dragon's Lair. So maybe there was some, like, thinking there, like, how can we create a Dragon's Lair sort of experience as, you know, within the limitations of an actual PC without a laser disc? Yeah. And this does have kind of a little bit of that flare to it, but as a different kind of game, it's much more fair. It's much less of a, like, hey, guess what button you have to push now? And it's not, it's not what Mechter started out doing. Like, I read this in the Apple II book.

Breakout. So this is more from that book, which you should all buy. But the first thing Meckner submitted was actually sort of an asteroid's clone. Deathballs, I think it was called it. So sort of asteroids by way of billiards where you're just... Deathballs, really? Or death? Oh, I like that name.

It's great. I think I've got it slightly wrong. But it was sort of an asteroid's clone, but instead you're shooting these balls that bounce off the sides. and he submitted his mid of this and Broderburn looks at it and said it's fine but it's just another arcade game we want something different

and that's when he started going in this completely other direction which it's really a completely different direction it's a completely different direction and so basically we have Broderbund's management to thank for having Prince of Persia and things like that that were different

from what we were getting at the time that's cool because that's the purpose of all good editors is they push you in a good direction and they guide your work and that's probably what their role was too, as publishers. Yep. So the next game I want to talk about,

the next really big one, is Radon Bungling Bay by Will Wright. And I don't really get this game, honestly, but it's extremely important because basically as Will Wright was putting together this sort of action-y simulation shooter resource management game, he was building, you know,

military bases and maps and cities and stuff and realized, you know, what's actually fun about this is putting together the maps. And that sent his brain spiraling to create SimCity, which, you know, this was 1984 along with Carotica. And in 1989, Carotica gave us Prince of Persia. In 1989, right on Mungling Bay, gave us Sim City.

Yeah, it's really... We've had a full episode on SimCity. Go check that episode out. It's great. Everyone loves that game. It's cool. But this is kind of like the rough draft for it, like the inception point. It's really part of the same story where they're moving from something.

thing that was a very arcade paradigm into a whole new direction. So like the actual point of this game is you're in, you know, some gun chip helicopter and you're supposed to like bomb the enemy bases to prevent some evil empire for taking control. The bungling empire. The bungling empire. I'm really curious where Will Wright came up with that, but I don't know. They just keep making mistakes. It's terrible. Yeah. But but but and then then it sort of went in this direction of building the maps for these bases. And that was the you know, obviously what Will Wright ended up latching on to. So it's sort of the same thing where you have this base of an Arcadia experience and, like, what now can we do with that? What other directions can we go in?

Now, it should be said that Bruderbund did not publish SimCity. They did publish Prince of Persia, like Mechner stayed with them. They even published his last game that they collaborated on, the Last Express, in 1997. So they had a long and fruitful relationship. Will Wright went off and formed his own company, Maxis, they hooked up with EA. But, yeah, it's cool that Mechner ended up, you know, maintaining his relationship with Bergerbund. It's really cool to see that kind of, I guess, loyalty, like, between, not just, you know, from individual to corporation, but also corporation to individual. A partnership.

Yeah, like they, I feel like they really gave him the liberty to do what he want. Let's talk about Prince of Persia and The Last Express, because those are both, like, we're going to go out of sequence here. But Prince of Persia takes the ideas of Carotica and really just runs with them and gives you a much bigger world to play through instead of just being like walk forward, punch guys, walk forward some more, punch more guys, now you're at the boss. It's, you know, like a dozen levels, 20 levels. You have an hour to get through it. It's full of non-human traps and hazards. There's like skeletons to fight. And you actually have, you know, a sword this time.

You pick up a sword early on and you can, you know, do fencing. And it's very inspired by like Errol Flynn type silent movies, you know, very swashbuckling and dashing. But there's pits to avoid full of spikes. There are guillotine doors. It'll try to kill you. All the way platforms. Yep. Lots of traps and tricks and hazards.

And every time you die, I think you don't really like lose anything except the time that you've wasted. So, you know, you have an hour to make it from. the deepest depths of the dungeon up to the Grand Vizier Jafar's tower or whatever where you fight him and prevent him from marrying the princess and becoming the king of Persia, I guess. Wow. It also brought us that cliff jumping thing where you hang on to the edge. Grabbing the ledge?

Yeah. Pulling yourself up. Yep, that is like a video game standard now. Metroid started doing it and Tomb Raider started doing it. Isn't that in Mario something? Mario does that now, yes. He can shimmy along Assassin's Creed. I mean, Assassin's Creed emerged directly from Prince of Persia.

The Patrice Desolet and some of the other people who worked on Sands of Time when Jordan Mechner went on to create Assassin's Creed, which kind of started out as an Assassin's Creed or as a Prince of Persia thing and win its own direction. Yeah, this is another through line from the few good things that happened from Broderburn's takeover an acquisition is this through line of Prince of Persia into Ubisoft and informing a whole lot of their stuff. and downs, but I think on the whole, on the balance, it's been a good thing that it exists. And sometimes, like, especially, um, some of the Etsio games, you can really see the Prince of Persia in it. Assassin's Creed 2, especially, I think it was, there were like these, uh, churches and stuff that you could go into, these standalone dungeons. And you were really, like, oh, I get it. This is, you know, this is, this is, this is Prince of Persia right here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you that the first time I saw Prince of Persia, I have a vivid memory of this. We went

into North Hills Mall, which was just a little simple building at the time, which is in Raleigh. And there was a computer store on the right after you exited JCPenney. And in the window on a monitor, they had a demo of Prince of Persia running. And it just blew my mind how fluid the animations were. And it was just like a showcase game for the IBM PC at the time. It really was incredible. Yeah, I mean, that was one of those games that they would just put out on the computers at the store. because you looked at it like that and Shadow of the Beast

and you were like, I need to play this, I need to own this computer. And Shadow the Beast, I don't think, held up that well once you actually played it. But Prince of Persia really did. There was a lot to it. And it really, yeah, like it's just a super influential game. Computer stores also had full color pictures of parrots at the time.

I'm always on display, share the color cards. Look what you can do on Amiga. You can scan a photo of a parrot. And let's see. But Prince of Persia, I found very punishingly. difficult and I never got into it. It's tough.

I agree. I don't like it that much as a game. I feel like it's a very skill-based game. It's for a certain type of person. Probably a meticulous platformer. Oh, like, cool it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I ever beat, actually beat the original platformer.

You love it. And then finally, the last express, the third game that Mechner created with Bruderbund is a very different kind of game. It's not an action game at all. It's an adventure game. But it really, it just drills down on his love of movies. And it feels like, it's like, it's like. If Murder on the Orient Express were a silent movie illustrated by Alphonse Munch, was that his name? Mucha?

Alphonse Muncha. Yeah. The French artist. Like, it's everything is basically like somewhere between traced and rhodoscoped. It's very choppy animation now, but at the time it was kind of crazy. It was kind of revolutionary stuff. The only problem was that it came out in 1990. 97 and everyone was moving to 3D.

So having this really glorious 2D animation was kind of like, eh, okay, that's fine, but, you know, I could play Quake instead. So I think it never really found that big an audience. And it's been revived and republished a few times. But unlike, you know, Prince of Persia or Carotica, even, which had a really great 3D game that came out of her Xbox Live five or six years ago, I feel like the Last Express has never really found It's never really found purchase

It feels like a niche kind of game It is very much I've never really run into it I mean at the time adventure games were dying anyway The Android animation was dying So it's like the worst possible timing To create a game like this So he took these rotoscope stuff

And put this very like flat shaded Drawing over it It ends up looking kind of It reminds me of like European art cartoons Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's very much that sort of Art Deco Mucha style. It also kind of reminds me of that that traced movie that Keanu Reeves did like six or seven years ago. And I can't remember whether it was scanner darkly.

Was it scanner darkly? Okay. Like it feels like the precursor to that in a way. Yeah. It's a really cool and interesting game. It's a very good adventure game. It's like time-based. You know, everyone on the train has their own.

their own routines and patterns. You saw ideas like that being explored in Majora's Mask and Shenmu a few years later, but it was really kind of a bold idea. It's, you know, ultimately a pretty short story. So it's meant to be replayed and experimented with and tested and, you know, for people to really dig into it. I'll tell you, at the time I had a huge prejudice against pre-rendered action sequences and full motion video, even if it was animated, because of the whole full motion video debacle

with the Sega CD and the 3DO and the CDI that just produced terrible games that weren't really interactive. So there was a prejudice already against something like this, I think, at the time, even if the Last Express is really great adventure game. No, absolutely.

It was the wrong game at the wrong time. And even though, you know, irrespective of its actual merits, it just, like, it was a huge flop. And, you know, Jordan was, or Jordan Meckner wasn't the only person to flop with an adventure game at that point. You also had like Starship Titanic,

which had Douglas Adams behind it. And LucasArts was having trouble finding purchase with their games. Sierra was, you know, having Old Man Murray articles written about how crappy they were. So it was just, yeah, it was a rough time. So that's kind of an unfortunate footnote. And I don't know, maybe, you know, whatever happened with Elast Express made it easier for the learning company

to swoop in and grab Bruderbund up. Maybe that was a big loss for that. A weakness. Yeah, financial weakness. Yep. So let's see. Two other big games worth talking about for Bruderbund is 1986. Where in the world is Carmen San Diego? The classic edutainment game

that really turns learning into a grand world globe-trotting adventure. It's a great game. So apparently this wasn't originally supposed to be an edutainment game. It was, when it was developed like early on, it was just like the idea was a cops versus robbers adventure game.

Like so point and click event, trying to, trying to take again like the early concepts from the early text-based adventures and make it more intuitive, make it with menus. I mean, that was what the guy who came in. Again, you know, another guy with ideas that they picked up, and his idea was like, let's take adventure games and make it easy to use menus so you don't have to like try to type the right verb or whatever. And so they were just going to do a cops and robbers adventure game and someone had the idea to make it like world traveling and have the clues be about,

And then it developed into what it is, what we all know is Carmen San Diego. But even so, like, it was originally developed and marketed as just an adventure game. But then schools loved it. And apparently this actually, again, this is, I believe, from the Apple Tee book, but schools loved it. And it kind of took Bruterovund by surprise that all the schools were buying this. And it sort of went in that edutainment direction. I actually almost wonder, because this was 86 and some of the, like, more educational applications we talked about were shortly after this. This may be what really...

It started in, like, the 90s. Yeah, yeah, in like late, days, early 90s. This may have been what cued brought up in to kind of that market being a thing to go for, things you could get in classrooms. Yeah, quite possibly so, yeah. Yeah, but this property was huge. Like, it transcended video games. There was a Carmen San Diego cartoon.

Yeah, absolutely. And a TV show. Yeah, a game show on PBS. Oh, I didn't know about that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a live game show. I didn't. There was a live game show, yeah.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, yeah, Well, the fourth or fifth grade that came out, and it was a game show with kids who would try to track down Carmen San Diego. It was on PBS. It was really awesome. Yeah, and there were lots of variants made, like, where in time is Carmen San Diego? And then there was the, I think, the North Dakota variant that Franks Falty dug up. There was, like, a weird story there that I can't possibly hope to tell correctly. But, yeah, there was like a very specific state-focused Carmen San Diego and North Dakota of all places.

I love that that existed. All kinds of spin-offs. Yeah, the other big game that Bruderbun published was missed, which we've had like a full episode on. So we don't need to rehash that. But it did represent like a huge step for them. I think Gary Carlston in breakout said like up until missed like the biggest thing they had was the print shop. And then Mist eclipsed that.

Like print shop was probably more profitable in terms of. ratio like cost to you know develop but uh mist was just huge was everywhere the top seller at the time yeah i mean it's actually it replaced prince of persia as the screen they put in the windows of the shop yeah i mean it was it was very much like it was you know kind of like the dark side of the moon was for a hi-fi system like yeah right you buy this with your cd rom system the show off your multimedia setup like you've got your speakers you've got your two x cd rom and you've got missed. And that's, yeah, that's what I did. Please go listen to the missed episode.

Yes. But there were some other games that they published in their shovel puck cafe, which we talked about in the Mac episode. Which is great. Blodia Diablo, which is something I covered in Game Boy Works. It's like a pipe dream kind of game. It actually started out as a Ti-99 for a game made for a competition by a guy named Manuel Constantinitis.

I looked at your video of that, and it looked incredible. frustrating. It's super frustrating. Type dream being played on a 12 tile puzzle. Yeah. It's really tough. Like the, I, well, the Game Boy version is really tough because of the design. I think other versions of it probably hold up better. Probably Bruderbun's version holds up better. They made a football game called Playmaker Football. Don't care about sports. So I don't know anything about that. Prince of Persia 2, the fire and the shadow and the flame, I think it was what it was called. It was like more Prince of Persia, but better and had even nicer graphics So great stuff there.

So that was their computer library. Let's briefly touch on their console library and then wrap this thing up. So we had some ports. Yeah, we've actually talked about a lot of these. Choplifter. Sega collaborated with them to publish Choplifter on a lot of different platforms. And yeah, now that I think about it, Choplifter never showed up on a Nintendo platform, although there was Choplifter 3 as a super NES exclusive from, I think, like,

KEMCO? So I don't know how that worked out. Load Runner and Radon Bungling Bay, of course, were huge hits on Famicom and probably did okay for themselves on NES in America when they were released a few years later. 1987 also saw Deadly Towers, which have we talked about that on Retronauts? I know we've mentioned it, but have we talked about it? I actually talked about it. I don't know. I've talked about about five times now or seven at least. But you've mentioned it. Have you explained what it is? I think we did a little bit. I don't know.

you're looking for bells, demon bells or whatever, and you're going on towers and you're... Yeah, it's a shame they didn't keep the original localized name for it. Yeah, what was it? It was going to be Hells Bells. Hells Bells, yeah. Because the Japanese title is Masho, which means like Evil Bells. So Hells Bells is a great localization, but Nintendo was like, uh, no.

Yeah, Deadly Towers is cool because it was one of those things where we had it for the NES. It was one of our five to ten games we had at the time, so we loved it just by default because we had to play it and there weren't any other options. And it had a lot of mystery and adventure in terms of the design of the world that you go through with all these towers. And I've also mentioned many times about the, just the, there's something about the way it portrayed these towers with these windows that were black inside. And I always wondered as a kid, as a kid does what was behind those windows, like what was inside those buildings. Something an adult would never think. But a kid thinks like that, and it fascinated me.

And it's a lot, kind of like an action, action RPG, sort of like Zelda a little bit, but you do power up over time. You get new equipment. There are these mazes you go through, and then you have to fight bosses. And you don't have very much confidence in your default sword. Yeah, it's really hard at first, because it takes like 20 hits to kill one of the first guys on the screen, which is why I think it has such a bad reputation. But if you power up for a while, you can do pretty well in it. Yep.

So that was... Do you know, obviously, Rutterbun published it? Do you know who developed it? Yeah, it was published in Japan by IREM, which means it's one of those Famicom carts with the red LEDs in it when you plug it into your system. But the developer was Lenar, who went on to develop Mercenary Force,

a very cool game for Game Boy that I covered in Game Boy works. It's like a multi-character shooter set in medieval Japan. It's a strange little company that made very unique stuff. Huh, interesting. It never occurred to me as a kid that this was Japanese because, of course, the cover art is a Western-style fantasy painting. But when you actually play the game, you look like a little kid in booties running around, you know. But that's like the super deformed Japanese style, I guess. You're like a little scowling kid.

Yeah. We didn't know what that meant in America. I mean, half the Nintendo Library had that dichotomy. at the time of the Western fantasy art. There were many ports that changed that art style into like a Western proportion character, you know. But they didn't do that for this one. And I think it got a lot of hate from Americans

because of that weird art style too. But I didn't mind it that much. Yeah, I never minded the art style. But it was very, it was a little flaky on like the hit detection and that's my thing. And the way of many early NES games. There was an article on the, you know, the early internet of,

games and stuff. You know, before there was one-up and all this game journalism online, Sean Baby had a huge footprint on the web, and he had a list of the worst. The games that he declared as terrible are still, like, in the internet consciousness. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, and Deadly Towers was up in the top. Yep. And that's, in my post on vintage computing that was really popular in 2005 was a reaction

to that Sean Baby thing where I said, no, actually, Deadly Towers is really cool. And my friend mapped the whole thing out for the first time. ever, here it is on the internet. Bam! And it was fun. Nice. There were three games that Bruder Bun published for NES, and they're all great. I love all of them.

The Guardian Legend, which is like, I'll see, a shooty sci-fi Zelda with a bikini robot who was also a spaceship. I'm sorry, that, how do you top that? No, it's a great game because it's set in a maze, like this planet that's hurtling toward Earth, I think, and going to destroy it. And so you go into the maze and infiltrate. And so the maze section is like top-down, kind of like the top-down sections of Blastermaster, but more Zelda-ish in terms of interconnectedness.

But as you unlock the game and travel through different regions, then you go to these corridors where the heroine turns into a spaceship and shoots enemies. And so you have to complete these shooter segments on the corridors in order to advance in the maze sections. It's a really, really cool game. And it's a sequel to a Japan-only game that's just a shooter. They added the action-rpg element to it. This has to be compile, right?

Because it's got there a little mascot guy as one of the bonus. Randar. Yeah, yeah. And this is actually one of the games that has been on my, I really need to play it all the way through this list for like 20 years.

I really need to get around to it. First time I played the Guardian Legend, I was really surprised at the depth of it. And how I thought it was just going to be a shooter or something, you know, but it has all this extra dimension to it. Yeah, I love it. It's a great game.

It's very unique. I need to get a hold of it somewhere. Next on their list is Legacy of the Wizard, which I would describe as the graduate course work in map drawing it is a massive um i want to say 16 by 16 map of screens and it's basically divided into four sections and you have a family that you control the drassel family it's the fourth dragon slayer game so we've talked about it in the dragon slayer episode yeah and the metroidvania episode so i won't belabor the point but they brought that over that was nihon falcom co-developed by compile for

NES, I believe. Great soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro. There's a lot to like about the game. It's also completely incredibly difficult and inscrutable, but I love it regardless. It's this enormous mass of interconnected stuff. Then you need the right tools for wherever you are. Yeah. I love this game. I love it. We played it over and over and over again. And it's like one of those games where we had it, so I played it a lot. But I think it's a genuinely good game, even though it's so difficult. but I've never finished it or anything. I finished it, but only by cheating and using a code. So then finally, completing the Bruderbund NES action RPG trifecta is Battle of Olympus,

which is a game that we all said, ha ha, that game is a total rip-off of Zelda 2. But a couple of years ago, I was able to speak to the director of the game, Yuki Ohromoto, who currently is the head of the company that created it, Infinity. and it turns out, yes, it was designed very much to be like Zelda 2 because he wanted to make a popular, successful game. So he looked to Zelda 2 and said, let's make something like that. And so he and his wife and one other person, the composer for the game, sat down and created this entire Zelda 2 clone.

And it's a damn good game for something created by three people. It looks really good. It plays well. It has a great experience system. It has like it's all set in ancient groups. Reese. I feel like we talked about this in Battle of the Metroidvania. Yeah, Metroidvania, we talked about twice, maybe. So again, I don't want to belabor the point, but it's a really cool game.

Do you have anything to say about it since you weren't on the Metrovania? It's another one I have never gotten a chance to sit down and play all the way through. But yeah, like you look at it and you can see it's sort of like the reuse of assets and how they're making due with a fairly small amount of, you know, because it was only three people, there's only so much they can do in terms of, you drawing new assets and stuff, but it's still, it's just, it's really impressive. Like, the whole package ends up looking really nice. And finally, at the sort of the tail end of Bruderbun's licensing efforts for the NES,

there was Dusty Diamonds All-Star Baseball, which, I don't know, I saw Crontendo cover it, and it didn't really connect with me. I'm not really that excited about A-Bid baseball games. Yeah. It's a baseball game, I like it seems okay. It's actually like, I think, like a softball. Yeah. series, isn't it? Like, it's, it's, you're playing as kids. Yeah, I, I, I, it's one of those things where I have a positive, um, memory of this title.

Yeah, it's also our softball. Yeah. I liked, you know, I'm not a huge sports fan either, but I think it was, it's a good, it's a neat game. And it looks like there's, like, unlockable kind of joke characters. Like, you can be hitting your softball with, like, a witch with a broom or an ogre. It is a very, like, oh, this game was made a Japan kind of game. Yeah, you can definitely, guys, because there's a classic, like, Oni is one of the unlockable, like, batterers. there like clearly All-Star softball But yeah that pretty much wraps up Bruderbun's NES licensing

Like they stopped bringing over games from Japan at that point And instead, you know I think once Prince of Persia came out They were like Let's just get this on everything

Then let's get Prince of Persia 2 on everything And then they hit missed And then they hit missed And they were like Let's just publish on PC Forget this console crap And so yeah

So the company Just kind of naturally graduated Gravitated away from From console publishing Which is a shame because they really, I feel like they really had an eye for publishing, like picking up good games to bring over, games that were kind of niche, kind of complicated, but really interesting and fun and memorable. It's a small set, but it's a really good set of NES games. And there seems to be some sort of relationship that I've never been able to lock down.

I don't know exactly what the details are, but they seem to have some sort of relationship in the 90s with Sunsoft, who did a lot of the work on like the console ports of MIST. like they there was there was some sort of there was some sort of collaboration going on with Sunsoft there's a there's a French journalist who has been making an effort to dig into the history of Sunsoft and I can't remember his name off the top of my head but he's done a great job of like digging up some information about Sunsoft's history and you know he

he has dug up a little bit of information about their relationship with Broderbund Bruderbund that company Broderbund whoever we're talking about those guys yeah So I will definitely make a mention of his name in the notes for this on Retronauts.com. So be sure to check that out.

But anyway, I think that's pretty much it for Bruderbund. Yeah, so then they got kind of wrapped up and parceled off. And some of their stuff lives on. Some of them with Ubisoft. But the legacy lives on. Yeah, we've got the whole Prince of Persia line going that way. There's that. And Mist kind of.

Yeah, I think Mist wrapped up. It's done. They did the fifth game and they're done. Well, then there was the online thing, which comes in and out of existence sometimes. There's abduction now. Abduction. It's like spiritual. But I mean, the Sims is still around.

That came out of Raynon-Mungling Bay. You know, Assassin's Creed came out of Prince of Persia. So even though, and you know, there's calendar creator, so what more could you need? No, they gave a lot of really amazing people their start. So, yeah, Bruderbund ceased to exist basically 20 years ago. But, you know, people still have. fond memories of their games. They were great games.

You know, Spalunker is still around. Spalunky came out of Spalunker. Load Runner still around. Like these games, Chop Lifter probably is still around. I think there was a choplifter game HD a few years ago. So, yeah, like these things that they brought into the world,

they helped, you know, kind of midwife into existence. Like, they still exist. You know what I want is a serpentine remake in HD? That would be cool. You could probably dig up the license for that really cheap. do it yourself. Okay.

Sol off your computer collection, use that money. Buy the rights to, by the lice, by the rights to serpentine. It would be, it would be a very different industry without all the stuff that they helped bring into it. So I have to say thank you, Jeff Vlasic, for requesting this topic and for, of course, supporting us at Retronauts. The Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. I enjoyed talking about Bruderbund and digging up their work. David Craddock for providing everything so much information and research to life. Be sure to check out Breakout available at find bookstores near you, or at least at Amazon.com.

It's a great hardcover book with a lot of awesome anecdotes about more than just Bruderbund, tons of companies about the, you know, who kind of made their mark on Apple 2. So yeah, great stuff. Everyone, this was a team effort. Thanks so much. So why don't you guys tell us where to find you. All right. I'm Ben Elgin. You can find me on Twitter at K-I-R-I-N-N. That's just my personal Twitter. I also have a retro things blog at Kieran's retro closet.tumpler.com. Only one-end and Kieran on there. I do post-retro game stuff on there sometimes. But if you tune in right now,

I hope you like Legos, because that's what I just dug out of my parents' closets. Lego is plural. Yes. Not Legos. Lego, plural Lego, yes. But there's going to be a lot of... A lot of 1980s and 90s Lego is about to go up on there. So if that's the kind of thing that gets you excited,

tune into that blog. And I'm Benj Edwards. As usual, you can find me on Twitter at Benj Edwards. And also vintagecomputing.com and I have a new podcast called The Culture of Tech,

the culture of tech.com. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite where I'm making bad dad jokes and posting occasional photos of hand-drawn video game maps. I don't know. It's weird. You can find Retronauts, of course, on all your favorite social media channels,

such as Twitter, Facebook, and Venmo, yes, send us money. No, actually, you can support us on Patreon, as I mentioned before, Patreon.com slash Retronauts to get early copies or early access to our episodes with higher bit rate and no ads. That's pretty cool. And otherwise, you can just listen to us at Retronauts.com or on Apple Podcasts or Podcast One Network or any point. plays that you acquire audio to fill your ears with. And so that's what we do. We're filling your ears. We'll be back again next week with another full-length podcast and some Friday or another

with a micro podcast. It'll be great. Look forward to it. Thanks a lot, everyone. Thanks again, Jeff Lossack. And thank you Bruderbund for having a hard-to-pronounce game, name, and also a great game. And caller number. And caller number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box. of chocolates. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out.

We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month.

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have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.