As I’m pretty sure I’ve said before, the thrift store scene hasn’t been as bountiful for me here in San Francisco as it has been in the past. Part of this could be due to the fact that the weather has been pretty much terrible, keeping people from doing spring cleaning and chucking out their old games. I also feel like the competition may have increased, perhaps owing to my broadcasting all this stuff all over the Internet. Oh well!
Either way, I’m going to pad this story out with some stuff that technically wasn’t from thrift stores – they’re games I bought from dealers at Wondercon and PAX East. And occasionally I paid a little more than I ordinarily would have. I’m not going to lie: It’s because I felt like buying things.
The games in the photo above, now, those did come from a thrift store in town. I saw the blue boxes sitting high up on top of a shelf in back of the counter, and almost wasn’t going to bother asking about them because I generally don’t pay a lot of attention to PC games – it’s an area of collecting where you can waste a lot of money on stuff that’s not worth much of anything. But something about the odd size and color of the boxes made me ask about them.
As it turns out, they were two old, sealed IBM PC games. Starglider… Starglider… Where had I heard that name before? I turned the boxes over and…
Oh, of course: Starglider! As in the early PC game from Argonaut Software, the co-creators of the Super FX chip and Star Fox. This was the first game that Dylan Cuthbert, who now runs Q-Games, ever worked on. Even Star Fox started out as a Starglider game – apparently, if you look in the game’s code you can find files that are still called by its original prototype name, “SNESGlider.”
Starglider and Knight Orc were both published by Firebird, the U.S. branch of Rainbird software, which was part of Telecomsoft, which was the computer software division of British Telecommunications. These imprints didn’t last very long. Like many PC games of the time, they come packed with a variety of extras. In fact, both include (probably very short) novelizations of the games in the box. Not that I’ll ever read them, because both games are sealed. I paid $5.49 each. Value? No idea.