Interplay / Activision 1986
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Sam Harlow - Private Eye. It all begins with a quiet day at the office when the phone rings. 'They want you dead', a voice gasps. And how right that voice is! Two thugs are already hot on your trail. And even after you manage to escape those two, that wasn't the end of it: Your ex-wife has been kidnapped, everybody who tries to help you is assaulted and even more bad guys are after you.

Icom Simulations 1986
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 5/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Interactive Fiction made more accessable: add graphics, add a mouse-driven user interface and use the capabilities of a modern 'windowed' operating system. But in spite of that all: don't forget about your target audience!

Cinemaware 1986
Genre: Adventure, Action
Rating: 2/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

The early and mid-90s - the wake of the CD-Rom as a games medium. Because the games themselves didn't need this space yet, tons of 'interactive movies' filled the shelves of the stores. Those were rarely more than a collection of movie clips and the players' only activity was to make a few (often pretty futile) decisions between the scenes. Many see 7th Guest as the beginning of this development.

Magnetic Scrolls 1986
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Europe's answer to Infocom wasn't in fact all that similar to its american counterpart. Apart from the obvious facts of being founded a lot later and surviving longer, Magnetic Scrolls developed their games for a completely different market. While Infocom was still stuck with the inferior 'typewriters' ruling the US market (to this day), Magnetic Scrolls wrote their games for 'home computers' - with the European market in mind, where these machines were immensely popular. The Pawn, their first game, was developed for the Sinclair QL, a then brand new computer which turned out to be a very bad flop. The game was ported to the other new 16 bit machines: the Atari ST and the Amiga. These versions first showed how fresh Magnetic Scrolls' approach to the genre was: they featured a set of graphics showing the settings in stunning quality! The later ports to the ever-popular 8 bit platforms (C64, Sinclair Spectrum) had to live without these graphics again.