Articles

Have you ever met someone
and wondered how you had not known that person for the past twenty
years? Well, it was that way for me after
I met and had spoken to Eli Tomlinson for only a few minutes. It
seemed our paths had always been going horizontally, but had never
crossed. You may have recently stumbled across Eli on Ebay – where
he has been auctioning some of his stock – or at his newly opened
online store Eli’s
Software Encyclopedia.

Eli resides in Scranton,
Pennsylvania – only a five-hour drive
from Just Adventure – and possesses an encyclopedic knowledge about
the history and evolution
of computer games. He also owns a ‘warehouse’ that contains almost
250,000 vintage computer games circa 1984 – 1994 – all in their
original packaging and many still sealed

Just to wet your appetite
a little – and I’ll write
more about the games later – how about sealed copies of the
original LucasFilm’s Maniac Mansion, Mean
Streets – the
first Tex Murphy game – and the entire Infocom collection. All told,
almost 20,000 different pieces of software, some with more than 1,000
units apiece, others with just a few rare copies. And not just adventure
games either, but every genre you can imagine: from early RPG’s
like Bard’s Tale and Wizardry to
sports games like Jordan vs. Bird and Microleague
Baseball. If you
can name a game from that
ten-year period, it is surely somewhere in Eli’s warehouse.

Neither Rain,
Nor Snow, Nor Dark of Night…

The five-hour drive to
Scranton turned to six hours as a never-ending, driving rain slowed
my progress. But once there, after a quick meeting
with Eli, we were off to the last place I would ever have expected
to find a secret stash of games – an abandoned grade school.

Up the stairs and through
the double doors from which hundreds of screaming children once
ran to escape into the late afternoon sunlight,
we entered a dreary, abandoned hallway littered with ragged posters
of Barney and random letters of the alphabet still clinging to the
wall. Six doors – three on each side of the hallway – led
into classrooms and still in place above each doorway was the name
of that classroom’s teacher.

Inside each classroom,
stacked from floor to ceiling, was box after box after box containing
tens of thousands of computer games. Each
room is devoted to a specific gaming system. There is a room full
of nothing but Commodore software, another for Amiga, two for pc
games, another for Apple and Atari ST and one huge room that is full
of a mix of opened software that was returned from stores for various
reasons. The software in this room is from the days when stores still
had liberal return policies and a game could be returned simply because
you ‘did not like it.’

It was like Christmas
in April with thousands of boxes to open and explore and while
Eli knows what games are in each room, he does
not always know the exact location, so of course it wasn’t
long before I gave in to the urge to search through the boxes.

I Promise Ma,
I’ll Quit After Just One Game…

By now you are surely
wondering how one person managed to accumulate such a wealth of
games. Eli started the day after his 16th birthday
when he got a job working in a computer store. He also did some programming,
wrote some software and soon published a few games. His growing connections
in the industry eventually led to him becoming the sole North American
distributor for CRL – a UK based software house that primarily
developed games for the Commodore. His middleman status for CRL allowed
Eli to make dozens of valuable connections at all of the major retailers
such as Electronic Boutique, Babbages, Best Buy and Wal-Mart. When
CRL went out of business and decided to liquidate their assets, Eli
stepped in and purchased their remaining inventory. He then proceeded
to make more money in one month selling the liquidated software than
he had earned for the previous entire year through the retail chains.
From that point on, Eli started doing what are known as close-outs.
He would purchase the entire stocks of companies like Box Office
or Microprose, wholesale a few pallets through his newly formed company
Mainstream America – one of the two largest software distributors
in North America at that time – to reach his break-even point
and then work trade shows on the East Coast. It was a very profitable
business.

Eli then made one of his
few poor financial decisions when he sold out to a company in Indiana.
This company soon declared bankruptcy
and flooded the overseas market – especially Australia and
Japan– with cheap software in an attempt to make some quick
money. The company then disappeared, owing Eli tens of thousands
of dollars.

After that, Eli continued
to rebuild his close-out business, albeit on a smaller scale until
a fellow by the name of Chuck Bond appeared
on the scene. Chuck – who was also known as Slash – approached
publishers such as Sierra and Microprose, purchased their licenses
and remanufactured their games as budget titles. Now this is another
story for another article, but this was the first I had ever heard
that there are cheaper, repackaged versions of games like Leisure
Suit Larry 1 that are not as desirable by collectors. The market
then further collapsed with the advent of cd-roms as publishers overestimated
their potential sales and now thousands of cheap, cd-rom games were
being sold beneath cost.

Eli opened a little computer
store in Scranton, married (later divorced) had children and forgot
all about the games in his warehouse – until
now. Besides his online store and Ebay auctions, Eli also plans to
open a small retail store in Scranton later this year.

Games As Far as the Eyes Can See!

As promised, it’s time to look at some of the games! I could
literally list for pages the games I saw, but for now I’ll
limit it to the adventure genre. Keep in mind that many of these
games are on 3.5 or 5.25 diskettes and many will probably not run
on Windows XP (But there are also numerous games on cd such as Silverload,
The Scroll, The Riddle of Master
Lu and more). In fact, I am currently
in the process of installing both a dual boot system and an older
pc with Win 95 so I can play or replay many of these old classics.
One of my favorite finds was a boxed copy of Daughter of
the Serpents,
which is the non-talkie version of The Dungeon of Shame favorite
The Scroll. Besides the games pictured on the opening page, I found
a nice selection of Sierra games, Legend classics and a complete
collection of Cinemaware (It
Came From the Desert, King of Chicago,
etc.).

Games I never believed I would own like the Magnetic
Scrolls Collection, Agatha
Christie’s The Scoop and Loom.

And even a game of which
I had never heard and what looks to be an instant entry to the
Dungeon of Shame – Free
DC, a must-play
game on 5.25 disks that has claymation creatures taking control of
Washington, DC.

But there’s even
more! Dondra, Lure
of the Temptress, Nine
Princes In Amber, Rex Nebular, B.A.T., Cruise
for a Corpse, James
Bond in the Stealth Affair….whew, I’ve
barely scratched the surface.

Now before you whip out
your checkbook to purchase those games you’ve
coveted for years, be aware that Eli has a daytime job and can only
go to his warehouse on weekends. Then, even though he has the game(s)
you want, he still may not know exactly which box they are in and
believe me, there are thousands of boxes so you may have to wait
until he accidentally stumbles across your game while looking for
something else.

But be patient, write to Eli ([email protected]) and tell him what
you are looking for, tell your non-adventure collector friends that
there are also lots of other classic games to be had at the largest
collection of classic software in the world.

You Can Go Home Again

So it was that five hours with Eli passed like five minutes and
my five-hour drive home stretched into almost 8 hours as I struggled
through both driving rain and then three hours of blinding snow.
But it was worth the journey as the back seat of my car was packed
with over 70 adventure games to add to my collection. Plus, just
the thought that a lot of Just Adventure readers would now be able
to acquire their favorite old games without spending a fortune was
more than enough to make the ride home warm.