Category Archives: Quest For Clues 2

1988 Origin Intro + Quest For Clues II Press Releases

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Updates have been thin on the ground here recently which is likely to continue for a while. I tend to be all or nothing with most things and my enthusiasm for blogging has been waning recently. I had thought about taking a complete hiatus but I’ll just reduce posting to as and when I feel the urge instead. The main distractions are work and a huge backlog of games crying out for my attention.

Having offered far too much money for her Kickstarter, I’ve been playing Jane Jensen’s Gray Matter most of the last week which I’m seriously enjoying. I’m a sucker for point and clicks and this is a about as traditional as it gets, with the sort of involving storyline I would expect from Jensen. When I get that finished, I have near enough the entire catalog of Legend sat on a shelf unplayed which I intend to make a start on.

That isn’t going to leave much time for this site but I’ll fit in some posts and the occasional Origin game somewhere. Today I have the last couple of items in a folder of press releases I’ve been slowly working through. They aren’t the pick of the crop but getting them on here does mean I can finally tidy the folder away. The first of these is a concise 1 page introduction to Origin circa 1988. This describes the company goals, foundations and gives short descriptions of the newest games at the time. It contradicts the official book of Ultima claiming that the move away from Sierra was to achieve greater creative control rather than being due to the poor royalties received on ports but I’m sure there were plenty of factors:-

Origin Press Release 1988

The second scan is a press release for Quest For Clues II from August 1st 1989. This appears to be a test run as it’s not on the usual headed paper and would probably have had a further product spec. on the back.

Quest For Clues 2 Press Release

4 More PDF's

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I’ve added another set of pdf’s to the downloads. They are Forge Of Virtue, and Quest For Clues 1-3. I struggled with Forge of Virtue so the quality isn’t brilliant, I may skip scanning the rest of the novels. The print is so close to the spine on them that the only way to get a decent scan would be to sacrifice copies for the greater good. I should get the last 3 Quest For Clues books scanned in the next week.

Quest For Clues 2

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I’ve only had time to read half of the next Wing Commander book so in the meanwhile I’ll briefly mention the next Quest For Clues book.  This was published in 1989 by Origin and is once again a collection of game walkthroughs contributed by Questbusters members. This time there is no introduction with a history of adventure games or the like so it’s more or less all game solutions and nothing else. You did get a free 3 month Questbusters subscription with the book but it wasn’t much use by the time I bought it.

All the solutions in the book are shown above on the back cover. Without any padding there are a stack of solutions in here for games you would struggle to find hints for elsewhere like Tangled Tales. This makes it still potentially useful but without any additional content, it’s less interesting for me as a collector than the first book. Of minor interest, I noticed that one of the solutions was contributed by Randy Sluganski, who has to be the same guy who writes articles at the Just Adventure (http://www.justadventure.com) website.

There isn’t a whole lot else to say about this one. I won’t bother scanning in anything from this book but if anyone wants one of the solutions to any of these games, post a comment and I’ll add it to the post.

On the subject of Questbusters, Terek Nor mentioned a great website over at http://questbusters3.yolasite.com which has scans of many of the Questbusters newsletters with game reviews and walkthroughs. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone interested in early RPG’s and adventure games.