The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - Mail-Order Monsters
Have you ever wanted to build your own monster with parts from a catalog and then go on a rampage? Then you'll love this game from one of the creators of Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters
RELEASE DATE: 1985
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Paul Reiche III, Evan Robinson and Nicky Robinson / Electronic Arts
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Fairly playable
BEST VERSIONS: Commodore 64
Sometimes, understanding how a game came to be helps to shed light on its concept. In the early 1980s, developers Jim Conelly and Jonathan Freeman created Crush, Crumble in Chomp! (featured earlier in this section) and then left the company they’d founded, Epyx, to do their own thing. Jonathan Freeman partnered with his wife to create Archon: The Light and the Dark, and they were helped by a young developer named Paul Reiche III, who’s now not only well-known for his work with Fred Ford on the Star Control and Pandemonium! games, but also for the Skylanders series. Both Reiche and Ford are also friends with Greg Johnson, the designer of Starflight and ToeJam & Earl, and that influence is also felt here, as Reiche was working on Mail Order Monsters while hanging out with Johnson during Starflight’s development.
All of those connections come together in Mail Order Monsters, a tremendously creative game developed by Reiche and collaborators Evan Robinson and Nicky Robinson which allows you to create your own creature of destruction with parts from a catalog and then go out and battle other monsters. The hook is that you can pick one of twelve templates called morphs that include forms ranging from dinosaurs to insects to giant ameboids to carnivorous ferns and then outfit them with survival attributes and a fearsome arsenal before you send them off to do battle with other beasts.
As you add on parts or genetically engineer your monster to have new attributes like a stinger or tentacles or claws, the look of your creature will change, a feature which the game is all too happy to show the impressive possibilities of during the start screen as a dinosaur is transformed into all sorts of fearsome beasts. It’s also possible to get psi-blast powers, chemical breath or webs you can shoot as well as countermeasures that make your monster more resistant to certain attacks. And all of that’s in addition to the many cool and creative weapons your monster can utilize, from a flamethrower to a mind-melter to a gravity wave gun to an electronic mace to a multiple laser weapon that can only be fired with tentacles.
The game’s modes offer a little of something for everyone. The difficulty levels scale from a beginner mode where you just battle a morph against other monsters to an intermediate mode where you customize your morph and the rules of your battles to a tournament mode where you get to build up a stable of monsters you can continue to improve, sort of like a proto-Pokémon where you have a tremendous amount of control over your creatures, but where the downside is that once a monster dies, it’s gone for good. Those who get tired of battling other monsters can also take on missions where they get to stomp all over a city and battle mechanized defenses, a capture the flag mode where eight flags must be collected before the guard kills you or a defensive “Horde” mode where you and a friend – either controlled by a human or the computer – have to stop hordlings from getting through.
Aside from being a generally great game that holds up fairly well today (though its controls definitely require an adjustment period for those who haven’t recently played Archon), Mail Order Monsters also had some wonderful packaging that includes a picture of a kitbashed Godzilla toy armed to the teeth with add-ons as well as six plastic models of the game’s weapons that are presented like they’re part of a catalog. While an Atari 8-bit version is referenced in the manual, the Commodore 64 version is the one everyone seems to have played, and it’s the one I’d recommend tracking down today.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about 3D games, arcade action games, wargames, grand strategy games, RPGs, sports games, gameroom games, puzzle games and so much more.
And while you’ll definitely see some titles from prominent North American publishers like Sierra On-Line, Infocom, Activision, Electronic Arts, Brøderbund, SSI, MicroProse, Lucasfilm Games, Epyx and Sir-Tech in the mix, you’ll also see references to games from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.
This series will continue to cover games written by unique personalities like Chris Crawford, Roberta Williams and Danielle Bunten Berry, by great writers like Steve Meretzky, Michael Bywater, Robert Pinsky and Brian Moriarty, and based on the work of famous authors like Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, William Gibson and Douglas Adams.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 1. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!