AstraWare is a great UK com­pany that makes a ton of what are con­sid­ered “casual” games for the Palm.  They are the sort of games that you can play in the 5 min­utes it takes to wait for the bus — wildly pop­u­lar titles like Bejew­eled, Cubis, and Sudoku as well as lesser known titles like Mars Needs Cows and the Strange Adven­tures of Infi­nite Space. 

When I heard news and saw screen­shots of their upcom­ing game release of Bro­ken Sword: Shadow of the Tem­plars, I got excited.  It looked like the old-school Lucasarts and Sierra games — the kind where you walk a guy around, solve puz­zles, inter­act with char­ac­ters, etc.  I got espe­cially excited when I was able to obtain a pre­re­lease copy.

I spent some time play­ing it at lunch today, think­ing that parts of it seemed vaguely famil­iar.  Upon return­ing to work, a quick Google search proved what I was start­ing to sus­pect all along.  Not only had I played it before, but I was work­ing for the com­pany that orig­i­nally pub­lished the game, Vir­gin Inter­ac­tive Enter­tain­ment, when it first came out in 1996. 

In other job-history news, it turns out that I [indi­rectly] worked for Jor­dan Weis­man of 4orty2wo (the peo­ple who did ilove­bees and Last Call Poker) not too long before Vir­gin, when I worked for Vir­tual World.  In fact, I got sum­mar­ily fired from Vir­tual World when the main office in Chicago learned that I wrote my own soft­ware to run on their sim­u­la­tor hard­ware.  Oops.

Wow, what a stroll down mem­ory lane.

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Tagged as: 42entertainment, brokensword, ilovebees, lastcallpoker, lucasarts, sierraonline, virgin, virgininteractive, virtualworld