Passport to Peril

One of the CD games my son likes to play on the PC is Pink Panther: Passport to Peril. We've got the Swedish version from 1996, Rosa Pantern: Resa på egen risk. Yes, he's playing a ten-year-old game on current hardware under Windows XP.

I suppose Pink Panther must be a particularly well-behaved Windows app. But still, hardly any PC games from 1986 will run in a standard PC operation environment from 1996. This has to do both with the late-80s proliferation of Windows and with games colonising the PC platform in earnest about the same time.

Wanderlust Interactive, makers of this excellent game, didn't live long.

... the CD-ROM era was fleeting. By the end of 1996, technical leaps allowed computers to send and receive ever-greater amounts of data over ordinary phone lines. Soon, PC users found much to fascinate them on the Internet, and their interest in buying CD-ROMs quickly waned. Wanderlust's first major product bombed during the Christmas season of 1996, and the company eventually filed for bankruptcy. Link.

The producer of the Swedish version, Ahead Multimedia, was merged with other companies in 1998 and lives on in this fashion as business education firm AcadeMedia.

So Pink Panther the game is effectively abandonware. The pink character himself, though, is of course heavily copyrighted.

[More blog entries about Pink Panther, computer, games, abandonware, Sweden; datorspel, Rosa pantern.]