Chunky Game Booklets – Part 3: From Strategy Guides to Downsizing the printed matter

Figure 16: Winzer (1991) is a strategy or economic simulation game with a surprising theme: winemaking. The booklet is accompanied by leaflets making you familiar with the not so familiar business. Photo: Suter

by Beat Suter

Instruction Manuals – accessible and for everyone, but now obsolete

Most games in the 80s and 90s came on discs or CD-ROMs in artful cardboard boxes and contained an insightful instruction manual. The printed booklet was essential for teaching how to play the game, telling a story or prologue and making a player familiar with the computer system the game was made for. Instruction manuals were clear and detailed, often even extensive. The Swiss games of the 80s and 90s relied on them as much as any other game. These instruction manuals showed an interesting diversity of approaches from story booklets over cartoons to extensive strategy guides.


Part 1 — A Serious Manual
Part 2 — Story Booklets
Part 3 — From Strategy Guides to Downsizing the printed matter


Continue reading “Chunky Game Booklets – Part 3: From Strategy Guides to Downsizing the printed matter”

Of Bare Chested Men and Violence: Barbarians and War in 1980s games and press coverage

by Aurelia Brandenburg and Adrian Demleitner

This text traces a joint inquiry into a loose link between bare chested men as protagonists and the depiction of violence in 1980s video games. For this analysis, we collaborated from our respective perspectives from historical and design research. Aurelia Brandenburg has a background in history, digital humanities and gender studies and Adrian Demleitner in software studies and design research. Our focus was on the reception as well as visual semantics of video games that used barbarian- or soldier-themed characters.

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Chunky Game Booklets – Part 2: Story Booklets

Figure 12: Rolling Ronny (1991) booklet with good layout and extensive gameplay and path section. Photos: Suter

by Beat Suter

Instruction Manuals – accessible and for everyone, but now obsolete

Most games in the 80s and 90s came on discs or CD-ROMs in artful cardboard boxes and contained an insightful instruction manual. The printed booklet was essential for teaching how to play the game, telling a story or prologue and making a player familiar with the computer system the game was made for. Instruction manuals were clear and detailed, often even extensive. The Swiss games of the 80s and 90s relied on them as much as any other game. These instruction manuals showed an interesting diversity of approaches from story booklets over cartoons to extensive strategy guides.


Part 1 — A Serious Manual
Part 2 — Story Booklets
Part 3 — From Strategy Guides to Downsizing the printed matter – coming soon


Continue reading “Chunky Game Booklets – Part 2: Story Booklets”

Chunky Game Booklets – Part 1: A Serious Manual

by Beat Suter

Instruction Manuals – accessible and for everyone, but now obsolete

Most games in the 80s and 90s came on discs or CD-ROMs in artful cardboard boxes and contained an insightful instruction manual. The printed booklet was essential for teaching how to play the game, telling a story or prologue and making a player familiar with the computer system the game was made for. Instruction manuals were clear and detailed, often even extensive. The Swiss games of the 80s and 90s relied on them as much as any other game. These instruction manuals showed an interesting diversity of approaches from story booklets over cartoons to extensive strategy guides.


Part 1 — A Serious Manual
Part 2 — Story Booklets – coming soon
Part 3 — From Strategy Guides to Downsizing the printed matter – coming soon


Continue reading “Chunky Game Booklets – Part 1: A Serious Manual”

Print runs of German Gaming Magazines 1980-2000

Upper part of a scan of the cover of issue 07/90 of Aktueller Software Markt (ASM).

by Aurelia Brandenburg

Gaming magazines are certainly an important part of the emergence of gaming culture(s) since the 1980s. There is, however, a difference between the importance ascribed by expert or fan circles and the actual distribution and, thus, the potential impact of a magazine. “Retro culture” tends to have a nostalgic bias. This means that it is useful to re-examine the basis on which significance is attributed to certain magazines. For this, I created a dataset consisting of sales and distribution data of nearly twenty German gaming magazines between 1980 and 2000. The dataset in full is available online through Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10009428) and a Google Sheet, and this blog post serves as an accompanying documentation of its sources and my own reasoning behind the magazines included and the table structure, same as some rough findings and visualizations based on the data collected.

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LINEL – a Swiss Game Publisher 2: Collaborations and Unreleased Games

by Beat Suter

LineEL – a Swiss Game Publisher:
Part 1 – A comprehensive list of LINEL’S games
Part 2 – Collaborations and unreleased games
Part 3 – Working for LINEL – is in progress

The following text originally appeared here.

LINEL was a software developer and publisher based in Switzerland. It had its headquarters in St.Gallen, Liechtenstein and Appenzell. The label was active from 1987 to 1995. LINEL was founded by seven or eight young Swiss developers in 1987. They focused on programming on Amiga and Atari ST but did some Commodore 64 ports and later DOS ports as well. Overall, 20 games were published with the label LINEL. Often, it was cooperation with other developer studios and publishers in the UK and in Germany.

Linel merchandize: a Swiss pocket knife for the publisher’s VIPs. Photo: Roman Werner.
Linel merchandize: a Swiss pocket knife for the publisher’s VIPs. Photo: Roman Werner.

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LINEL – a Swiss Game Publisher 1: A complete list of LINEL’s games

by Beat Suter

LineEL – Swiss Game Publisher:
Part 1 – A comprehensive list of LINEL’S games
Part 2 – Collaborations and unreleased games
Part 3 – Working for LINEL – is in progress

The following text originally appeared here.

LINEL was a software developer and publisher based in Switzerland. The label was active from 1987 to 1995. LINEL was founded by seven or eight young Swiss developers in the 1980s. They focused on programming on Amiga and Atari ST, but did some C64 ports and later DOS ports as well. Mobygames credits LINEL for 16 games. These are the following:

Continue reading “LINEL – a Swiss Game Publisher 1: A complete list of LINEL’s games”
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