Mindshadow - Activision, Inc., 1984 - IBM PC (4K)
13A playthrough of Interplay's Mindshadow, published by Activision for the IBM PC in 1984.
Mindshadow, a classical illustrated text adventure, was one of three games contracted by Activision in a $100,000 deal. The game was loosely based on Robert Ludlum's novel "The Bourne Identity" with an amnesiac storyline. As the player, you wake up on an island beach without any memory of how you got there or why, and now have to try to piece together the story yourself.
Allen Adham, one of the game's programmers, hired by Interplay co-founder Brian Fargo, would later become one of the founders of Silicon & Synapse, a company that a few years later became Blizzard Entertainment. Rebecca Heineman, who also was one of the four founders of Interplay, worked on the game and would later found Logicware, Contraband Entertainment, and Olde Sküül.
Heineman earned her early glory in the videogame business when she and a friend traveled to Los Angeles, in 1980, to compete in a regional branch of a national Space Invaders championship. While she didn't expect to fall under the top 100 contestants, she won the competition. Later that year, she also won the championship in New York. Hence, Heineman is considered to be the first national video game tournament champion.
Mindshadow was released for nearly all of the era's 8-bit machines and later for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga and while mostly receiving mediocre reviews it went on to sell around a respectable 100,000 copies.
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