Thanks for the scan, Milford. I'd heard of the Theseus game before, but I've definitely never seen these covers. It's always nice to see more TSR products with the Face logo. The
Acaeum TSR Stock List has the product codes as 3501, 3502 and 3503.
Here's a page with a closer pic of the Thesus cover, and the artwork is the same as in the poster:
http://yois.if-legends.org/vault.php?id=225
A very primitive 3rd-person dungeon crawl from TSR, the masters of non-computerized role-playing games. Input consists of keystrokes and one-word commands. The drawing routines are very slow, and you can win immediately (albeit with a very low score) by turning around at the very beginning and exiting the labyrinth. Fantasy illustrator Larry Elmore did the cover art.
The Dungeon! cover looks like an Easley. I've seen that artwork before - one place is the
German B2 HET FORT IN HET GRENSGEBIED - but I think it was used somewhere else?
Some anecdotal evidence:
http://www.armchairarcade.com/aamain/co ... article.60Just to add to the article a bit, if I remember correctly, TSR produced a few mediocre computer titles for the Apple II in the very early 1980's, one of which was "Dungeon" (I remember seeing a small, but interesting color screenshot in one of my early issues of Electronic Games), which I believe was a relatively simple RPG/maze game (randomized dungeons) hybrid. It must not have done very well (nor their other computer titles) as I've only seen one eBay auction for it ("Dungeon" and one other title) and additional information on the Internet is VERY hard to come by. Perhaps TSR underestimated the computer market (and the need for actual QUALITY and thought put into these products) even moreso than Avalon Hill did early on, as the computer titles from the latter are better known, more readily available and were produced for many, many years, despite also having a very mediocre initial run of titles...
Anyway, TSR obviously did pull out very early on, but made some smart deals with Mattel (Intellivision), and later, SSI (computers and some consoles)...