Catalogue · three entries · last updated never
Three games that arrived without being chosen. They were bundled on a new PC in a folder called Games, or copied onto a floppy by somebody at the next desk. Nobody picked them, nobody bought them, and nobody kept the manual — so each entry below has been given the manual it lost.
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The deal, Object, Controls, Scoring, The author
Microsoft, 1990. Bundled with Windows 3.0. Provenance: every office PC on earth.
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The archer, Object, Controls, The enemies, Registering
John Di Troia, 1992. Shareware for Windows. Provenance: a floppy disk, from a stranger.
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Chip, Object, Controls, The tiles, Reading the board
Chuck Sommerville / Epyx, 1989. Atari Lynx, then the Windows Entertainment Pack. Provenance: a school computer lab.
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Credits, Anachronisms, Sources
What this is, what was left out, and where every screenshot came from.
Why a manual
A manual is a strange thing to write for games nobody had trouble playing. Solitaire needed no instructions. Bow and Arrow was one gesture. Chip's Challenge taught itself by killing you. But the manual is the only part of this kind of software that was ever written down, and it is the first part to go missing: the disk gets archived, the printed sheet in the box does not.
So each entry is laid out the way a manual was — who you are, what you are trying to do, which button does what, what will kill you, and how the score works. The rules on these pages come from the games and from the people who documented them, not from memory, which is the thing that has been quietly rewriting these games for thirty years.
How to read an entry
Each entry is coloured in its own game's palette, because colour is most of what survives in anybody's memory of them: a green field, a green table, a grey floor. Each carries one real screenshot, captioned and credited, and a box listing the facts that were checked and what they were checked against. If a claim here has no source in that box, treat it as somebody's recollection rather than documentation.