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Southern California Distribution Issue 02 Part 07
-Companies, Dead or Alive?
It's hard to say that some companies are dying, but some are in fact
corrupting themselves.
Origin
They've been doing very well this year, with the introduction of
Ultima VI, which proved itself to be another great hit, and Wing Commander,
which is one of the greatest flight simulation arcades available. Soon,
they will be introducing Ultima VII and Worlds Of Ultima II. The new
Ultima interface will use a new image paint program, named
Terramorph Draw. It will be able to handle image of any size, without having
to use multiple tiles like Ultima VI. Their new digitizer will also be put
to work, and the portraits should look even better. 1991 is probably going
to be a great year for Origin.
Sierra
Sierra have had a rough year so far, with King's Quest V delayed
three months and finally out, along with Space Quest IV on hold.
If they would start working faster, 1991 will be a good year. Sierra has
been working on their new network, TSN, for some time. This new network
will allow users to play games(Actual EGA graphics games) online, with
other players. This might success, but their real investment is in
the CD-ROM market. King's Quest V CD-ROM will give us the first image of what
CD-ROM games are going to be like.
Activision/Mediagenic
They've been dying lately, with the recent staff cutbacks and selling
their mail order division, Triton. They do not seem to be releasing anything
other than BattleTech II, which was very disappointing. Their future don't
look good unless they get their acts together.
Accolade
Accolade have been doing very well, with their release of TD3,
Ishido, Stratego, and a few others. They've been successful this year,
and they should continue to grow in 1991.
Spectrum Holobyte
This company has two of the most awaited flight simulations releasing
soon, Falcon 3.0 and A-10 Avenger. Their release of Stunt Driver was not
bad at all, aside from the fact that Stunt Driver was too hardware demanding.
New World Computing
1990 was a dissapointing year other than the release of Nuclear War.
Tunnels & Trolls was a failure, but it would have been successful if it
was developed in the US instead of Japan, which would have made it VGA
instead of EGA. Their future releases include Might & Magic III in April
of 1991, and hopefully the game will be good.
Strategic Simulations, Inc.
They had a decent year, but their hallmark of the future would be
Eye of The Beholder. Eye Of The Beholder will prove to be a major technological
breakthru for SSI, since it broke free from SSI's traditional 3D perspective
into a large screen Dungeon Master like interface, overall, the graphics
look very nice.
Sega
This year couldn't have been any better for Sega. 1990 was a very
successful year. With the introduction of Joe Montana Football, they've set
new standards for themselves. Hopefully their future conversions will be as
good as Joe Montana Football.
Lucasfilm
Not a bad year for Lucasfilm. Their eagerly awaited simulation,
Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe is going to be a hit. The graphics look
great, and the game play is good.
Maxis
Amazingly, SimCity is still in the top ten selling games. With their
introduction of SimEarth for Mac, the IBM version shouldn't be far away.
SimEarth would probably be another hit, just like SimCity was.
Cinemaware
They did not do very much this year, other than the fact that they are
developing for the TG16 CD-ROM. Wings, is the awaited game from them, and it
should be fairly good. Dragon Lord also looked good.
Electronic Arts
They have released many good games, and this year was no exception.
They will be releasing Hard Nova, although a new name, it is practically
the sequel to Sentinel Worlds.
Dynamix
Good year for them, just merged with Sierra. They've released Stellar 7
and Rise of the Dragon, and both are good. Heart Of China is due out soon.
Interplay
Decent year, with the introduction of Battle Chess II and
Battle Chess VGA, along with the new Lord of the Rings. The new games
look much nicer than the old ones in EGA.
Access Software
A good year for them. Links, which some people say doesn't work,
some say it works. It actually depends on how the setup is done. If
EMS or XMS is not set up, that's for sure it'll be slow as hell, but it
runs fairly fast even on a 286-10MHz with 2 Meg XMS. CountDown was
pretty nice, usual short game, but it is very nice. Cartel will
hopefully be even better than CountDown.
And last, but not least...
Virgin Mastertronic
They've been doing well since they started with selling $10 games.
Alice In Wonderland looked very nice in VGA. Spirit Of Excalibur also
was a good game. More are to be expected from this growing company.
Because of the large number of companies, we only included a major
portion. The companies seems to be growing, and are all late on releases, but
this is a good trend, since it will help stablize the market a bit. Back in
1984 when the market crashed, the only reason is that the developers are
releasing too fast for customers to buy them, and caused major overstocks.
This slow down will prevent the crash from happening again.
