Bonbon Quest: a candy-collecting platform game

Most entries here got a page: a description, a screenshot strip, system requirements and a download link. A handful got a full two-part review as well, and Bonbon Quest was one of them. That matters for an archive, because a review says what the writer thought was worth arguing about, whereas a listing only says what the game contained.

The game itself is a platform title in the collect-and-progress tradition. What the extended coverage adds is evidence that it held the attention of the people running the site for longer than a listing required — a soft signal, but the only kind available at this distance.

The extended coverage also preserved more of the game than a listing would have. Three screenshots survive rather than one, taken from different points, which is the closest thing to moving pictures that this kind of record offers. For a platform game whose feel cannot be recovered from prose, a wider set of stills is a genuine if partial substitute.

The commercial arrangement was the usual one for the period — a Windows demo with a registration purchase — and the extended coverage suggests it was working well enough to be worth the site's attention twice. That is a soft inference and it is the only kind available: no sales information about a game of this size and vintage survives in any form this archive can check.

The studio is named on this page, and not by the text that was written about the game. All three surviving screenshots carry an in-game credit along their bottom edge — the title, the address oliverpearl.com, and a 2006 copyright line for Oliver Pearl. Neither the listing nor the two-part review names a publisher anywhere, so for this entry the pictures are the primary source and the prose is the secondary one. That is worth stating plainly rather than quietly absorbing, because it is an unusual direction for evidence to run and it is the reason this entry can be attributed at all.

The address the credit points at is still answering. Oliver Pearl describes itself as a team of two, formed in 2005 after both had worked in the games industry in Paris and moved to Brittany, and the name is a compound of the two people rather than a surname. Its front page is intact and its copyright line runs to 2015; its games catalogue, however, returns a forbidden response, so the studio's own list of titles cannot be read and this game cannot be confirmed as still for sale. Publisher established, availability not — two separate questions that this archive keeps separate, and one of the few entries here where the answers differ.

The listing figures are modest and specific: fifty-four levels, one or two players, and a requirement for DirectX 8 or later on Windows 95 through XP. One more line on that page is worth preserving because it dates the era more precisely than any of the numbers — the order link reassures the reader that payment is handled safely and securely through a well-known and trusted source. A studio selling a nineteen-dollar game from its own website in 2006 had to answer the question of whether a card number was safe to type at all, and the answer had to be printed next to the button. That sentence is now the least likely part of the page to be understood without explanation.

Established: the genre, the studio and its address, the fact of both a listing and a two-part review, the date of each, and three surviving screenshots. Not established: the two individual names behind the studio, the release year, and whether the game can still be bought. The unusual thing here is that the attribution came from the images rather than from anything anybody wrote.