The Adventure Workshop

The Adventure Workshop was a 1990s British "homegrown" text adventure game company. It was run by Philip M. Reynolds of Oldham, Lancashire,UK. The Adventure Workshop started off producing conversions for Amstrad CPC & PCWs, but quickly expanded to include original games and cover other 8-bit machines.

It's final catalogue included over 200 titles (the conversions of many of which were licensed from the Spectrum-focused behemoth Zenobi Software) published for the Amstrad CPC & PCW, Spectrum, Commodore 64 and MS-DOS.

In their own words: "The Adventure Workshop was set up in 1992 to provide a service to adventure authors who wished to have their games converted to other computer platforms, mainly converting games from the Spectrum 8-bit to the Amstrad CPC 8-bit computers. It started out as a hobby but rapidly grew into being the biggest Amstrad Adventure Software House in the UK. In January 1993 we decided to branch out into the PC market by converting some of the best 8 bit Adventures."

The Adventure Workshop also republished games that had previously been available through Recreation Re-Creation Software, The Guild Adventure Software and Compass Software. According to an article in The Adventure & Strategy Club, in late 1994 The Adventure Workshop's catalogue of games included over 120 Amstrad titles, 90 ZX Spectrum adventures and 13 Commodore 64 games.

Games

• A Day In The Life of a Tupperware Salesman (Simon Avery; 1990; Spectrum).
• Dances with Bunny Rabbits (porter: Philip Reynolds; 1993; Spectrum). Spectrum port of Dances with Bunny Rabbits (Simon Avery, publisher: Wow Software; 1992; Amstrad CPC).

Links

• The Adventure Workshop - a page about the company; including links to software and examples of advertising.