Source: RUN – Issue Number 32 – August 1986
Personally, I’ve never been overly fond of sports simulations and these days those words mostly bring to mine the latest iteration of Madden NFL. However, in the days before EA came to dominate sports games, other companies were producing great sports games as well. Access was quite well known for sports simulations of a certain type…primarily golf.
This particular ad features both a golf game and a bowling game. Leader Board was perhaps the best known golf game (and later series) for a long, long time. Released on the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST, the original Leader Board was an outstanding example of the genre no matter which platform you played on. Sure, on the 16-bit systems the graphics were a little better but even on Commodore’s 8-bit they were excellent for their time (we’re talking 1986 here). And the game play was outstanding. Leader Board supported up to four players and while realistic as you could expect a golf game to be for the time, it was easy enough to pick up and play that you didn’t need to be some kind of golf expert.
The bowling game featured in this ad, also released in 1986, is 10th Frame and was as good of bowling simulator as Leader Board was a golf simulator. Despite being long before the motion abilities of the likes of the Wii controller, control with the joystick was still excellent and the graphics were quite good as well. You could play with up to 8 players and 10th Frame even supported league play. I find it slightly amusing that they needed to list “Automatic scoring” as a feature though. If there’s one thing a computerized version of bowling should definitely be able to do it would be to keeps score. 10th Frame was initially only available on the Commodore 64 but was later ported to other platforms including the PC and Atari ST.
Like I said, sports sims were never my favorite genre and I preferred some of Access’s other outstanding games like Echelon. However, I still enjoyed games like Leader Board and 10th Frame on occasion. Anyone who likes this kind of sports sim should check them out. No doubt, there are other far more realistic and graphically superior games today (especially golf) but these still hold up well in my opinion. You’ll have to grab a disk image and emulator if you want to give them a try though. There aren’t any modern re-releases that I am aware of.
The ad above is from the August 1986 issue of RUN magazine. All screen shots are from the Commodore 64 version of the game.
