Confidential Magazine #4 April/May 1989

This issue came hot on the heels of British Telecom's decision to bail out of the games industry. They were looking to sell off the Rainbird, Firebird and Silverbird labels as one lot, while winding Telecomsoft down. The official reason given was that games were no longer in line with the goals of BT, and the asking price was rumoured to be around £5 million. The editorial questioned the motives, highlighting a series of recent misteps resulting in significant financial losses, which included the purchase of Beyond Software (closed down soon after due to poor performance), and the US based Firebird Licensees Inc which lasted less than a year.

Contents:

• A look at the state of computer chess games and whether they were worthy opponents.
• Mini (tongue in cheek) profiles of the Confidential team.
• A visit to French game studio Lankhor.
• A space trading game face off: Elite vs Federation of Free Traders. Conclusion? FOFT had a long way to go...
• Keith Campbell delved into the adventure game development process.
• An introduction to Play By Mail gaming.
• Diverging somewhat from the adventure theme, Jeff Minter was interviewed.
• The results of the Golden Chalice Awards for 1989, which was held by the Adventurer's Club.
• A look at free BBS MUD game "MirrorWorld".
• A guide to mapping adventure games.
• A visit to "The Spirit of Adventure" LARP group.
• Michael Bywater lamented on the prospect that adventure games had now entered an evolutionary period with no revolutions anywhere on the horizon.

Official Magnetic Scrolls Solution Books

While digging through some boxes of old Stuff from the attic I came across a couple of solution books for the adventure games "Corruption" and "Fish!" by Magnetic Scrolls. I got these directly from Magnetic Scrolls, and they're far superior to regular old walkthroughs as they include location maps, hints for specific situations along with the step by step solutions.

Confidential Magazine #1 Sept/Oct 1988

Back in 1987 I ordered a copy of the classic adventure "Guild of Thieves" along with my Amiga 500. Included in the game's package was a copy of "What Burglar?" magazine, and an advert for a mysterious "Confidential" club. Well, that's how I remember it - looking through the box now I don't see such an advert in there, though there is an offer to write in to Magnetic Scrolls to receive some swag. Or maybe there was a card/form that I filled out and posted. At any rate, I joined. This turned out to be the Special Reserve mail order club founded by Tony Rainbird, and "Confidential" was its magazine.

The mag was actually really good - always full of interesting articles, with a focus on adventure games. I'm pretty sure I still have every copy, so over the coming weeks I hope to scan them all in.

The PDF of the first issue can be downloaded here.

Contents:

• Psychobable - Adventure gaming news roundup, and details of the exclusive Magnetic Scrolls game that was coming with Issue 2: "Myth".
• Something Very Fishy - Details of the next Magnetic Scrolls game, "Fish!".
• A Mega-Game in the Making - A preview of "The Kristal". Was it worthy of all the hype?
• A Spy in the Camp - Interview with Level 9.
• Non Player Characters - Alive or Dead - Should NPCs be doing more to justify their existence?
• Whither Adventuring? - A look at Role Playing games.
• Into the Labyrinthe - Graeme Kidd goes LARPing.
• It Comes in the Mail - A round up of Play By Mail games.
• All About Infocom - Interview with Dave Lebling.
• A Wordsmith Pinned Down - Interview with Michael Baywater.
• Small Companies, Big Software - A round up of small independent mail order software companies producing quality adventures, and some advice for budding adventure creators.
• Uncle Mel's Pwoblem Corner - Mel Croucher answers readers questions (well, they may not have been real correspondents).

The return of Magnetic Scrolls? (Sort of)

Well, this is very interesting indeed. Hugh Steers - a founding member of Magnetic Scrolls - has formed Strand Games along with Stefan Meier (from if-legends.org). Their first release is a a remaster of the classic adventure "The Pawn", available for Mac, Win and Linux. Not only that, but they have the support of other Magnetic Scrolls alumni, including Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon.

I stumbled across their site somewhat randomly - I'm a bit surprised it hasn't received more coverage in the retro gaming scene. The funny thing is I had recently been pondering whether a iOS interpreter for the Magnetic Scrolls games would be an interesting project to take on...

It's well worth checking out their blog which has details of their efforts to recover data from old Magnetic Scrolls backup tapes.

Fingers crossed this is just the beginning!