I had Bards Tale 3 for the C64 with it's record sleeve
and code wheel. A few years back I bought an RPG
collection from Interplay that included the Bards Tale
series and was surprised that it also had the original
code wheel. Unfortunately all the manuals for the 10
or so games in the pack were all condensed into a
single, rather basic looking manual

I used to spend a lot of time reading and re-reading
the manuals that came with AR, the Ultima series and
the Infocom games. These manuals used to build up a
lot of the background and atmosphere before you even
loaded up the games.

I still have my C64 Dungeon packaging which I thought
was really good with its fold-out panel and diary
entries.

Guilherme

--- "Piringer, Frank"
<Frank.Piringer--msnyuhealth.org> wrote:
> ...the big, flat, record-album like sleeves the old
> computer games used
> to come in? The Bards Tale series, The Seven Cities
> of Gold -- was it
> just EA games, or did Broderbund use them too? I
> used to love the big
> cover art and correspondingly oversized instruction
> manuals that used to
> come tucked in the sleeve on the front panel. They
> were more like
> narrations - they had an introduction, and were
> sometimes written as if
> from a character in the game, with incomplete lists
> and everything.
>
> I just bought a new game from Target this weekend,
> and sighed when I
> realized it was just a DVD case with a cardboard
> wraparound. The
> instruction manual looked like a folded brochure.
> They really don't
> make em like they used to.