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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