#penguin software

[retrocgads]

UK 1985

[c64screengrabs]

It’s been many years since I played Spy’s Demise and it was great to play it again. Originally written for the Apple II, it was soon ported to the C64 and several other platforms. You play a little spy. Each level contains 12 floors and the objective is to get him to the top of each, while carefully timing to avoid the elevators that are moving quickly up and down at varying speeds. Getting hit by one causes your spy to explode somewhat dramatically in a mushroom cloud (and revokes a life). A pleasant music set of 4 classical tunes loop during gameplay. One of the best features of the game is at the end of each level a line of a cryptogram is revealed, with 9 lines in total. For instance, the first line (pictured above) decodes to “micewithvisualde” or ‘mice with visual defects’ which is a clue to the final answer of ‘Three Blind Mice”. The clues in subsequent lines however were more difficult and bewildering, making it a fairly challenging puzzle to solve: another one of the solved lines was ‘eighty six partner’ which was a reference to the 1965-1970 TV show, Get Smart, of who the protagonist Agent 86′s partner was Agent 99. This would be a very difficult solve for someone who had never watched the show or was too young to have seen it.

Once decoded, the message revealed a phone number to call and a person to ask for at Penguin Software. Doing so granted the caller a prize of a Spy’s Demise t-shirt. In order to foil cheaters, the programmers included a 10th line of cryptogram that never actually shows in the game. This line reveals a code word that was to be spoken to the person the player called, but in doing so it revealed that they scanned the code instead of playing through the game, and subsequently disqualified them for the prize. Although the game was released in 1982, by the end of 1984 only 4 people had won shirts. Unfortunately I have no knowledge of how many shirts there were in total, and if all were eventually won or not.

[krjpalmer]

Softalk February 1983

The Apple IIe rolls off the assembly line, and this issue takes a look at the assorted improvements made (“at last,” some might have insisted at the time) to what was now more clearly being acknowledged as Apple’s bread-and-butter computer. There’s also an introduction to the Apple Lisa (briefer, and dwelling in large part on that system’s bundle price of just under ten thousand 1983 dollars before sales tax), a profile of Penguin Software, and an “computerize your home” article leading off with how this helped the owner’s cat.

[retrocgads]

USA 1984

[retrocgads]

USA 1984

[retrocgads]

USA 1984

[retrocgads]

USA 1984

[retrocgads]

USA 1984