Brian Howarth and the final Mysterious Adventures

[Gunness]

For starters, does anyone know whatever became of Brian Howarth? Playing the Mysterious Adventures series was one of my first encounters with adventure games, and they were rather popular back in the day. But I have no idea where BH went off to. I asked Scott Adams, as they worked together for a while, but he didn't know, either. I have sent a mail to AdventureSoft as well, but otherwise I'm running out of ideas.

Secondly, two final games in the series, Midwinter and After the Fire were announced. However, all information on them seem to lead back to the same sources. Were they ever released?

EDIT: Mike Woodroffe has answered back and doesn't know anything except that BH probably moved to the US.

[Alastair]

World of Spectrum has Brian Howarth's permission to distribute his games, see http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek ... an+Howarth$. So they must have had contact with him at one time, and perhaps they know Brian's current whereabouts.

P.S. I have a Mysterious Adventures booklet that mentions a third game that might not have been released, the title is Beyond the Infinite.

[Alastair]

Here are the relevant pages from the booklet:

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[Gunness]

Very interesting. I'll try to add those descriptions.

Re: WoS's permission.... it's based on a general permission Howarth gave in a newsgroup back in 1998. So they haven't actually been in touch with him.

[dave]

Re: WoS's permission.... it's based on a general permission Howarth gave in a newsgroup back in 1998. So they haven't actually been in touch with him.

I missed that somehow (and that's the time when I used to read r.g.i-f. A quick search of the newsgroups does show some tantalising bits, for example, this post from PDD:

BTW, Brian plans to release all-new multimedia versions of his games... but don't hold your breath, nothing's fixed yet.

We could try to see whether pdd has contact details; but that post was nearly 20 years ago!

[Gunness]

Incidentally I contacted PDD (via Facebook) and pointed him in the direction of this thread But so far no answer - I don't know how actively he uses FB, though.

[dave]

Is it me, or does the description for After the Fire sound like the game Lone Survivor

As Lone Survivor only had a C16/Plus4 release as a throwaway I wonder whether it was completed, but never got to full production quality...

[Gunness]

Of course, that makes sense. Lone Survivor certainly doesn't seem like a full-blown game. I can't believe I didn't think of that myself.

[Alastair]

Lone Survivor starts off in a spaceship whereas in the pages I posted above for After the Fire it states that you start the game inside a mountain. If you look at the descriptions for Midwinter, After the Fire, and Beyond the Infinite you can see they have a common theme of a post-apocalypse setting, so is it any surprise that another Brian Howarth game from that time also has a post-apocalypse setting?

[Gunness]

Lone Survivor was released by Tynesoft rather than Howarth's usual company, so it's not unlikely that a few changes were made compared to the catalogue.
Besides, his games are not exactly known for their verbose descriptions, so changing the beginning shouldn't have been a major undertaking. And taking another look at the blurb for After the Fire, the setting does sound somewhat like what ended up in LS.

[Zel58]

Brian lives in moorpark,ca. He moved to California in 1990. He has worked for cinema ware,mass media. The last gaming company he worked for. He went onto program for digital cinema for Avica in santamoica ca.after the company went bust he ventured out on his own and now writes apps for the iPhone and has even considered making some of the mysterious adventures for the iPhone. How do I know all of this. I,m his wife of 33 years and he is sleeping next to me.

[Gunness]

Very interesting Thanks for posting. I have sent you an email.

[Gunness]

I wouldn't want this to slip underneath anyone's radar, so my interview with Mr. Howarth is now online. Enjoy!