Ever wished for a community of friends you could always rely on for laughter, camaraderie, adventures across time and space and several universes’ worth of puns? Welcome to Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. Josh Mandel’s point-and-click adventure for Legend Entertainment might not have received the acclaim it deserved on its release in 1997, but it has since won a well-deserved cult following for its humour and warmth.
Josh – one of Sierra On-Line’s leading lights before his departure after changes at the top robbed the adventure game powerhouse of its creative verve – had been a big fan of sci-fi author Spider Robinson’s stories about Mike Callahan and his loveable set of barflies for a while when the opportunity to develop the game arose. Even so, in some distant universe where computer games’ cultural cachet has always been more on a par with Citizen Kane than Duke Nukem, this article’s about a title based on David Eddings’ epic fantasy, The Belgariad.
“Apparently, or so I’m told, David Eddings, did no more than glancegames like and and games like that, and that he was unfamiliar with ‘adventure gaming’ or CRPGs. He apparently had no interest in investigating further, and Random House really didn’t want to press the issue with him. So (Legend’s founders) Mike (Verdu) and Bob (Bates) came back to me and said, ‘’s DOA. So give us the names of two authors whose work you would be interested in adapting some way into a game.’ I gave it a little thought and said, ‘Dean Koontz,’ (whose books I was very much into at the time) and, ‘Spider Robinson.’ Shortly thereafter, for whatever reason – perhaps having to do with Random House’s author relationships – they said, ‘Spider Robinson it is.’ And that’s how the game got started.”
