It is sad news for Adventure Gamers everywhere. Last month, Gerald Moore aka Shay Addams passed away at the age of 76 in a house fire. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s under the pen name Shay Addams, he single handedly managed the QuestBusters Newsletter for a dozen or so years, and authored countless Quest for Clues anthologies, offering game hints to the masses at incomparably low prices when the only alternative until then was to purchase an expensive hint book for each individual game. His works were read and loved by thousands of armchair Adventurers, and he will be sorely missed. Here's one final tip of the QB helm to ya Shay!
Today we have another small update, and much more importantly an announcement. The time has come to pass on some of the items from the museum, to help raise funds for other endeavors. So everything in the museum is officially available for sale.
Before anyone panics, the web site will still continue to exist as before and with all the items in it, just the physical items will be for sale. And for the moment we are only interested in selling off the 'high-value' items. Any item which is no longer in the physical collection will be indicated by a Item Not Available in the bar along the top of the item's page.
If you see any items that you'd like to make a generous offer on, please contact us and let us know. There are no fixed prices but we'd expect to get the going rate for the item. Many games in the museum are the only examples available for purchase in the wild, so now's your chance to snap up those rares and fill the holes in your collection!
This update includes a slew of Japanese Ultima Online versions including a very cute cartoony one. Be sure to check them out, now in their own subsection of the Origin room in the museum. A rare Japanese release of Cranston Manor has been added as well.
The latest updates include a rare Japanese version of the Scott Adams Adventures, as well as several of the obscure Comm*Data releases of the Mysterious Adventures series. Along with that is also a rather hefty Molimerx catalog containing hundreds of pages of TRS-80 and IBM PC software sold by the mail order company in the 70s and early 80s. Also some miscellaneous Ultima-related ephemera. Have a look around and enjoy!
With today's update, along with more new and interesting finds, we also must sadly remove the Castle Akalabeth and Japanese Mystery House that were obtained recently from the exposed forger, Enrico Ricciardi. I won't go into more detail here as others have already covered the news in much greater details than I ever could, and it is thanks to their detective work that these fakes have been identified. It saddens me that from now on I will probably need to question every rare or semi-rare game the museum acquires, and makes me wonder if perhaps any of the other items already in the museum are high quality forgeries as well.
Luckily the forged items do not hold up to scrutiny under a hi-resolution scanner, so at least some of the rarest items in the collections can be authenticated still.