Interestingly, nobody has yet asked me about the mention in Shatner's book.
A few marketing-related notes today.
First off, if you wanna pick up some old versions of my games for FREE, you can do it if you hurry! GazeboBoy sent me the following ad from CompUSA.
Basically, Expert's dumping old versions of their stuff. You can buy any of the above games for $9.99 and get a $10 mail-in rebate. Two of the above boxes, 24 Games and Arcade Magic, are mine. The catch is that you can only get one rebate per address, and you've gotta get the rebate ticket in the mail by 6/5/99!
FWIW, the packs are pretty good. They don't have the polish of the latest set, and they're all 16-color, but they're still fun. On the other hand, they do include Win 3.1 and Macintosh versions (which were dropped for the latest set). If you've got a Mac or an old version of Windows, this is the way to go.
I really doubt I'm gonna see any royalties from this, so don't buy the games thinking you're doing me a favor. It appears to simply be an attempt to dump a warehouse-full of excess inventory.
Although I am interested in seeing how this'll appear on the royalty report. . .
"The good news is you sold 75,000 games this quarter. The bad news is that you don't get squat." :)
On another front, we have some more game sightings! One diary-reader reported seeing a single copy of the new game pack at Wal Mart, which is the first sighting of its kind. Unfortunately for him (but not for me), the game vanished from the shelf while he was debating whether to buy it. He was eventually able to purchase the game at a CompUSA, but it was reportedly bundled with a mediocre casino pack.
While the wife and I were in CompUSA to buy a couple of Expert rebate-games, I spotted the new pack. They only had two copies, but they were thankfully not taped to any other products.
Such is life in the discount rack. You've gotta prepare yourself to be duct-taped to a font-pack every Christmas :)
Finally, I noticed that my latest-n-last game pack for Expert, 40 Games for Windows, is number two on Expert's bestseller list. I don't know if that means it's a big seller, or if Expert's just got a warehouse-load of games they need to dump. The list never says that they're the top-ten sellers, just the top-ten "customer favorites" --whatever that means.
Expert game-pack trivia:
- 40 Games for Windows is the most misnamed product in the industry. It's basically a combination of the games in 24 Games and Arcade Magic, plus three new games I wrote for the pack. Given that there are 15 games in Arcade Magic, that brings the total to 24+15+3 = 42 games. If you count the games on the back of the 40 Games for Windows Box, the count comes to 40. They left two games off the list so it would jive with the name :)
- In a further feat of misnaming, 40 Games for Windows includes Macintosh versions. Not surprisingly, Mac sales are pretty poor.
- One of the screen-shots on the back of the 40 Games for Windows box isn't one of my games. It appears to be a poker game of some type, but it's not one I wrote. I told them about this a couple of years ago, but they never fixed it.
