Video Games & Computer Entertainment: Taking a Spin With Don Mattrick

This post features a couple scans from Video Games & Computer Entertainment's July 1989 issue. The magazine calls it an interview with Don Mattrick but it's more of a brief article about the original Test Drive game. Test Drive released in 1987 for home computers and the series is still around today as a new Test Drive Unlimited was recently announced that is in development at Kylotonn. Mattrick created the game with his company Distinctive Software that would later be acquired by Electronic Arts (EA) in 1991 and subsequently renamed EA Canada. While Mattrick worked at EA until 2007, he is probably best known for his time at Microsoft where he helped develop the Kinect Sensor for Xbox 360 and took a fair amount of blame for the poor reception of the Xbox One at the console's launch. He left Microsoft in 2013 and spent two years at Zynga after that.

Gaming Ads: Accolade

Bob Whitehead and Alan Miller, two former Atari employees who also helped found Activision, founded Accolade in 1984. Accolade both developed and published games and today are probably best known for the Test Drive games as Infogrames kept that series going after acquiring Accolade in 1999. Other high profile games include Star Control, Hardball!, and Bubsy. The Bubsy games aren't considered to be very good, in fact the two sequels were reviewed quite harshly by critics. Despite that the character Bubsy managed to make a mark in a decade flooded with platform game mascots and Retroism even revived the series in 2015, releasing updated versions of the first two SNES Bubsy games for PC.

I spent a fair amount of time playing Accolade's Commodore 64 games, most notably Test Drive, Hardball!, and Mini-Putt. The first Test Drive is a bit unique as it wasn't about racing against other vehicles around tracks. Instead players had to drive up a mountain at a quick pace while avoiding accidents and the police. Accolade games typically had very good computer graphics in the '80s and Test Drive was no exception. The original Hardball! isn't deep in comparison to today's baseball games, having only two teams, one ballpark, and no season play. For the time though, it could be considered to be fairly realistic and if you were a fan of baseball it was definitely worth playing. Mini-Putt was likely the best mini-golf game on the market in 1987 and possibly one of the best mini-golf games of all time but then there really aren't too many games to compare it to...and maybe it's nostalgia talking but I did have many good times with that game.

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