It is time again: Equipped with the classic fedora and the good old whip in your hand, you are standing in front of an ancient temple to figure out one of mankind's best kept secrets. If you are now thinking about a well-known leather jacket salesman, I am afraid that you are mistaken: We are not talking about the escapades of Indiana Jones, but about Tex Bonaventure on the search for the water of life.
Though honestly, if the licence could have been financed, we certainly would have met Indiana Jones here. 'Tex Bonaventure', on the other hand, is a wordplay on 'Text Adventure', of course, which already gives us an idea of what's to come.
3D is just so much more immersive! With the release of Doom, the gaming world changed. Side scrollers, which had been the big thing before, which even had had whole computer systems designed just for them, suddenly looked so old-fashioned and nobody needed all those layered graphics and hardware accellerated sprites anymore. When even Mario went 3D, all seemed lost. All? No, a small group of idealists still resisted. Just surprising that, of all game producers, Sierra – the epitome of square – was part of this rebel fraction standing against the mainstream. Who would have thought?
If you look over the shoulder of a core or hobby gamer today, you will surely find a gamepad in their hands. Such a controller is a must-have equipment and even the showpiece of every console. Further bundled with a sensational game title, the console appears as an irresistible package in the stores. But in the 80s, strange flowers sprouted here and there. At that time the joystick was still very popular and the home computer sector could not be imagined without it. Such a joystick was then also included with the Atari XE console. But for the overall package, Atari even included a keyboard for "advanced games" and – to get to the point – a lightgun. The toy in futuristic design was the means of virtual pest control in the included game Bug Hunt. The novel firearm, together with the launch title Bug Hunt, was the driving force behind Atari's first computer-derived console release. This seems very daring nowadays, since the control via controller is so natural. But in its time, the Atari marketing department apparently saw an advantage in the versatile usability of its console. The XE Game System was supposed to offer real arcade feeling with the help of this lightgun, which you could otherwise only get for many coins at the slot machines. Later, Nintendo also produced a lightgun called Zapper for the competing NES and marketed it together with the game Duck Hunt. In the end, it was clearly the NES that won the race for market share and the lightgun has largely disappeared, not least because of the lack of cathode ray tube monitors. So, did Atari bet on the wrong horse on the usability side, or was perhaps even the game offered in the overall package the drawback? An answer is purely speculative of course, but I mounted the horse, put on the cowboy boots and strapped on the shooting iron.
