For my next game I was going to be writing about a Canadian game, but I wanted to get a mystery out of the way first: the company Software Magic, which sold TRS-80 software but has almost no Internet presence whatsoever.
It first pokes its head out early in 1982 with ads for “Potions”; here’s one from Computronics, March, 1982:
Later the same year, starting at least by October they started advertising a catalog you could get for $1 with “adventure, simulation, D&D and arcade programs”. The November edition of 80-U.S. in particular advertised the adventure games Lunar Mission and Marooned in Time.
Dale Dobson over at Gaming after 40 is the only person in the entire history of the Internet who seems to have ever had any encounter with them, as he somehow obtained the spring 1983 edition of the $1 catalog in his younger years. The entire catalog — just a few pages — is at the link above.
There are 16 products listed; 3 of them are adventure games: Gods of Mt. Olympus, Marooned in Time, and Lunar Mission. Based on the ad I showed earlier at least two of those were from 1982.
Out of all sixteen games, none of them are available in any archive. All have vanished. What makes this more distressing is that other than the French Canadian house Logidisque there doesn’t seem to be any earlier companies in Canada devoted to publishing games; in other words, what was quite possibly the first English-language Canadian videogame publisher is a ghost.
I’ll get into the Canadian-made adventure game we do have a copy of next time; this seemed like too big a side mention to put into a footnote. Also, I wanted the faint possibility that someone in the future who recognizes the name Software Magic might happen across this post via Internet search and enlighten us in the comments what happened with them.
Renga in Blue 
Yeah, Dale popped the game entries into CASA. It’s always a real shame to see instances where none of the releases seem to have survived from a company. I think the earliest Software Magic advert I’ve seen was in the December 1981 issue of Computing Today… where the prices were both in Canadian Dollars and, because it’s a UK publication, Sterling! There’s various adverts, reviews and magazine mentions between 1981 and 1983 but after that, like you say, they seem to vanish. Working out of a Bramalea post office address means it’s difficult to do any detective work.
is that the only ad where they mention Sorcerer too? there’s not a ton out there for Sorcerer but it is one of those things where one/more/all of the “potions” might already be out there under a different name.
https://archive.org/details/computing-today-1981/ComputingToday198112/page/88/mode/2up?view=theater
I think we’re safe saying Lunar and Marooned didn’t get published until ’82, maybe Gods was in ’83.
The three Computing Today adverts (December, January & February) do all mention the Exidy. I’m guessing they may have been placed as a block booking so their appearance over three months might not necessarily reflect the actual level of support for the Sorcerer.
There is also this from the January 1982 edition of Interface Age.
https://archive.org/details/InterfaceAge198201/page/n159/mode/2up?q=software+magic+bramalea+ontario+canada
And this from 80 Microcomputing in January 1983 featuring short reviews of Marooned In Time and Lair Of Evil.
https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1983-01/page/n441/mode/2up?q=software+magic+bramalea+ontario+canada
Always nice to see a review! (if nothing else, occasionally a company advertises a product that is actually vaporware, so this means that at least two of their games really existed … although with that big a catalog, I figured they had to be out there somewhere)
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Analyzing the role-playing video games described in the catalog, I have drawn some conclusions that do not leave Software Magic in a very good position, and that could be an indication of its disappearance.
https://exploradorrpg.wordpress.com/juegos/farops/
that does sound Eamon-ish, although Eamon is very specifically coded for Apple II and it would actually be tricky to convert straight to TRS-80
so I’m guessing the stole Eamon conceptually but I would not be sure they modified any source code without seeing it
Of course they changed some things, like adding character classes, and they had to port it to TRS-80, which has its merit, but considering that their other role-playing game coincidentally is also a version of a game with BASIC listing published in a magazine, it seems quite likely that they had access to the code. There are too many coincidences, and after all it was a fairly common practice back then.
Assuming it matches, The main thing to look out for is if any trs-80 eamon source shows up. It is possible one of the games got mangled authorship but landed on a disk.
Hi Explorador,
Sorry to thread-jack, but I thought you might be interested in a couple more obscure/lost Heathkit games I’ve come across recently that may or may not be RPG-ish, if you haven’t noted them already:
Castle Gor (Generic Software, 1983)
Issues 12/83 and 1/84 of REMARK:
https://pestingers.net/pages-images/heathkit/computers/remark-magazines/remark-cvrs.htm
The Vault (CyboSoft, 1984)
https://archive.org/details/sextantissue11julyaugust1984/page/n86/mode/1up?view=theater
Thanks, and sorry for not replying sooner. I didn’t see the message until now, when Google returned the page when I did my own search for Castle-Gor after seeing it advertised here:
https://pestingers.net/pdfs/remark-scans/1983/remark-issue40-1983.pdf