I admit that the title of this post is perhaps a little overly dramatic. I just want to mention a few games that I wish I could write about on the blog, but that I haven’t been able to track down copies of, physical or digital, and where it seems particularly difficult to do so. Of course, if anyone on here has any leads, or even happen to own a copy of the games in question, feel free to contact me.
Det gäller livet!
This game (the title translates to “It’s about life!”) was created by the somewhat famous Swedish author Sven Fagerberg. It was some kind of literary text adventure, and was released for PC by the company Scandinavian PC Systems in 1994, or possibly 1993 according to different sources. I have vague memories of having played it a little myself when I was younger, since we had a copy of it on our family computer. Unfortunately, when my parents recently looked through their collection of old games, all they could find was the manual for this particular game. I am aware of one copy of the game existing in an archival collection of Fagerberg’s works at the Linnaeus University, but when I contacted them, they told me that it’s only available to play if I physically visit the archive and play it on a computer on site, which is a little impractical, to say the least.
Carnival Tycoon
I have previously written about a game released for the 1990 Lund Carnival, and at the end of that blog post, I mention that there have been a few other games made for later incarnations of that carnival. The 2014 game was some kind humorous strategy game, and was apparently only available to play in your browser via the official website of the Carnival, presumably as a Flash game. The site made for that year in particular is now only available in bits and pieces on the Internet Archive, and the game is nowhere to be seen. The fact that it was browser based means that it might be tricky to get running even if I were able to locate it somehow, possibly by getting in contact with someone who was involved in developing it.
An easily playable version of Kosmopolska
Okay, this isn’t a case of the game itself being difficult to find (I own a copy myself!), it’s just that I wish that there was some easy way to set up and play my old favorite, the 1997 multimedia game Kosmopolska on a modern computer. Since it’s some kind of unholy combination of Macromedia Director adventure sequences and RTS sections made in C++ that barely held together even back in the day, the only way I’ve managed to get it to run is through PCEm, after first having set up a copy of Windows 95 in it. The problem with this is that it’s kind of difficult to recommend to less geeky people. They might get interested when I describe it as an unusual, fascinating and artistic game with relatively high production values, but then I have to say “okay, so first you have to set up an emulator, and then install Windows 95 in it, and then run the game through it, and even then it might crash now and then…” I was recently happy to learn that ScummVM has begun supporting some Director games, but I suspect that it will still be long time before it can run Kosmopolska, if any of the developers are even aware that the game exists.
I might sound a little negative about the chances of finding these games, but I’m not going to give up hope entirely for any of them. There have been a number of other games that I’ve had similar struggles with finding, and had sometimes been on the edge of giving up on, when I suddenly made some breakthrough and managed find a copy. In fact, there was another game that I had intended to write about in this post, since I had been unable to track it down, but as I was writing, I did another web search for it, and to my great surprise and delight, I found a copy that I could order! I’ll keep it a secret for now, but hopefully I’ll be able to write about it on the blog in the future. In the meantime, I’ll take it as a sign that I shouldn’t give up on trying to find the other “Holy Grails” as well.
