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”

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”

Confoederatio Ludens at the Games & Literature Festival in Marbach

by Eugen Pfister and Adrian Demleitner

From 28th to 30th June 2023, the German Literature Archive Marbach has organized a conference on “Games & Literature. On the literacity, research, collection, and archiving of computer games”. The idea for this conference came because, since 2019, the Literaturarchiv has been collecting not only German-language literature but also digital games if they “contain narrative structures to a high degree.”1 In the words of the call for presentations: “The substantive reasons for this decision are numerous, but, fundamentally, computer games have long been part of our cultural memory, which must be archived appropriately and examined in relation to established cultural forms.”2 Accordingly, the self-imposed goal of the conference was to discuss with international colleagues issues of collecting and archiving digital games, as well as research questions concerning the nexus between digital games and literature. Even if the claim turned out to be a little too ambitious in retrospect, a very exciting and fruitful exchange took place. Over three days, more than thirty colleagues from three continents presented their research, and we were honoured that our project was represented by four colleagues: The second day was opened by René Bauer and Beat Suter from the ZHdK with their keynote “Considerations for Archiving Games. From the Perspective of Game Design”. And on the third day, Eugen Pfister and Adrian Demleitner from HKB presented our joint historical database of games developed in the DACH region up to 2000: “Why we thought it was a good idea to build a DACH games database.”

Continue reading “Confoederatio Ludens at the Games & Literature Festival in Marbach”

  1. https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/games/deutsches-literaturarchiv-marbach-sammelt-kuenftig-auch-computerspiele-a-1255563.html []
  2. https://www.dla-marbach.de/forschung/verbund-marbach-weimar-wolfenbuettel/tagung-literature-games/ []

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.

Continue reading “LINEL – a Swiss Game Publisher 2: Collaborations and Unreleased Games”

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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