The Coveted Mirror (1983)

We’ve featured companies here before (like Adventure International and Sierra On-Line) that started their main development in games, with a few extra utilities being sold on the side. When Mark Pelczarski formed Penguin Software, their initial core product was (rather than a game) their Graphical Magician, which held them steady through their early years. However, they eventually became prominent for their adventure games: Transylvania, Crimson Crown, The Coveted Mirror, The Quest, and their re-published version of Oo-Topos (originally without graphics at all). Considered across multiple platforms, the adventure games are what sold the best for Penguin, but it took The Graphics Magician existing in the first place for those games to appear. Back of the Graphics Magician box, via eBay. Their first adventure game, Transylvania, came to them essentially by accident and didn’t originally have graphics. They got the author (Antonio Antiochia) an early copy of Graphics Magician to make it a…