Game

Sierra On-Line was maybe THE Apple II dev. They made a lot of the most popular adventure games of the day, many of which you probably still know about, despite coming out almost 40 years ago. Games like King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Glory, Phantasmagoria, the list goes on. They were very, VERY big at the time. And around the growing height of their fame, in the mid 80s on their home town of the Apple II, they also made this.

It’s a simple text adventure with graphical components, mostly just a solid unmoving image. You move around a grid of a map, and sometimes into spaces on those grids like houses, in order to find items that are scattered around the Hundred Acre Wood. You then need to bring those items to their owners, who are scattered around, mostly in their houses. You are not Pooh in this, you’re just some random kid. There’s lots of spaces to explore, and every now and then the items move aroumd. They start randomized, and there’s a large pool of them but only 10 show up, so it’s technically different every time!

Game

For an Apple II game, I have to give credit, this LOOKS good. Compare this to a lot of the other games like this, text adventures which have an image at the top of where you are, and it’s night and day. I can actually recognize Owl!! They clearly put actual effort into the art, which is not a surprise since they probably had Disney breathing down their necks, and Disney will NOT let you do off-model art.

Over all, this is a very simple but kind of cute kids adventure game, where the adventure is mostly wandering aimlessly and occasionally running into a character you like. I was a HUGE Winnie the Pooh fan as a kid, so I had some sense of whimsy playing this, but there’s not a whole lot to it. There’s a reason that despite Sierra On-Line being one of the biggest game companies of the time, I could find very, very little about this game online. Sierra has a lot of great games I wanna check out sometime, and a wonderful history that was sadly cut short in the late 90s when it was bought by some big-ass firm that fell apart quickly, like all those big ass firms that buy companies do. It then lost all its talent and became a shadow until finally being devoured by Activision, because capitalism is garbage. But at least we can still look back on its classics, like looks at notes Winnie the Pooh.