The Game: Using a simple drag-and-drop system (controlled by keyboard, mouse or joystick), put the elements of an original Garfield comic into place, including everyone’s favorite big orange cat, Odie, Jon, Nermal and all the fixtures and fittings of home (including a big burger and some lasagna). Then position speech balloons in the appropriate place, containing either signature Garfield catchphrases or your own words. Print and/or save to disk, repeat ad nauseum, and avoid Jim Davis’s lawyers thereafter! (Developmental Learning Materials, 1985)
Memories: This nifty bit of creative software used to keep me entertained for hours on end. With a bit of advanced option tweaking, it was even possible to import standard hi-res images to use as the background for a scene, so it wasn’t impossible to, say, drop Odie into the middle of a saved image of an Ultima IV meleè. Not that I’d do such a thing, of course.
The program’s use of dithering to circumvent the Apple II’s 6-color hi-res mode was also helpful; given the Apple’s severe graphical limitations in recreating the comic’s colorful characters, it worked nicely (as you can see below).
Maybe not a game in the strictest sense, but a really good use of a license which failed to make it into video game form (click here to see Atari’s unreleased Garfield game), and something for which I found endless uses (and misuses).
