Role Playing and Strategy Games
We also published a couple games that fit into the fantasy
role-playing genre, which was already dominated at the time by the Ultima series
written by Richard Garriott of Origin Systems, and the Wizardry series by Bob
Woodhead of Sir-Tech Software. Penguin's offerings in this category were Expedition
Amazon, by Texan Willard Phillips, and Xyphus, written by Skip Waller and
designed by Skip with Dave Albert. Bob Hardy also worked his magic with a neat Macintosh
version of Xyphus. Both sold modestly, but few had much success
breaking the Ultima/Wizardry lock on this market niche.
We published two of John "BEZ" Besnard's programs and already mentioned Arcade Boot Camp.
John self-marketed dozens of clever and very well-written programs as "BEZware". Most were of
the strategy variety like Pensate. He sent us many
others, but we couldn't keep up with him! We thought it would be really neat to eventually
put together a compilation of his work, but unfortunately that never happened.
Pensate is an original strategy game, kind of in the checkers/othello mold... or
maybe a little like chess. It definitely wasn't the typical flashy action game of the
time, but we took a chance on publishing it and it sold modestly well.
