Callahan's CROSSTIME SALOON

YOU'LL ENTER IT AS A STRANGER, AND YOU'LL LEAVE AS A FRIEND. JOIN ADVENTURE GAMING LEGEND JOSH MANDEL FOR A BEER OR TWO IN CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON: A HILARIOUS, UNSUNG CLASSIC FROM THE LATER YEARS OF THE POINT-AND-CLICK ERA'S GOLDEN AGE...

- GEM WHEELER

Ever wished for a community of friends you could always rely on for laughter, camaraderie, adventures across time and space and several universes’ worth of puns? Welcome to Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. Josh Mandel’s point-and-click adventure for Legend Entertainment might not have received the acclaim it deserved on its release in 1997, but it has since won a well-deserved cult following for its humour and warmth.

Josh – one of Sierra On-Line’s leading lights before his departure after changes at the top robbed the adventure game powerhouse of its creative verve – had been a big fan of sci-fi author Spider Robinson’s stories about Mike Callahan and his loveable set of barflies for a while when the opportunity to develop the game arose. Even so, in some distant universe where computer games’ cultural cachet has always been more on a par with Citizen Kane than Duke Nukem, this article’s about a title based on David Eddings’ epic fantasy, The Belgariad.

“Apparently, or so I’m told, David Eddings, did no more than glance at the design, if that, and said, ‘I don’t want a lot of teenagers running and jumping and punching their way through my universe,’” Josh says. “It seemed pretty clear that Eddings’ concept of computer games had been formed mostly by exposure to console games like Super Mario Bros and