Game 1: Monopoly (1985)

That little “A Parker Brothers Game” would later come around to haunt the author…

United States
Released 1985
Genre: Board game
Developer: David M. Addison
Date Started: 21 June 2025
Date Ended: 21 June 2025
Total Hours: 2
Difficulty: Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 21

I’ll start off this blog experiment with the oldest Amiga PD game[1] I was able to find: Monopoly by David Addison. Conveniently enough for me for having something to talk about instead of rattling down boring fact, this game comes with a bit of lore attached.

Let’s start at the beginning though. This is 1985 and the Commodore Amiga 1000 has just been launched in the US on July 23, 1985. Pretty much right from the start, a healthy scene of hobby developers evolves around the new computer and eagerly starts to explore its ins and outs, very likely motivated by the fact there wasn’t all that much info around, and Commodore wasn’t a big help on that front. Only a few months later, in November 1985 the first disk of the Fred Disk series is released, marking the beginning of a staple in Amiga hobby software distribution that would see 1000+ releases by 1994, spanning a wide variety of applications, helpful scripts, and sometimes games, often distributed together with its source code.

David M. Addison’s Monopoly came as part of Fish Disk #15, nestled between desktop applications and graphic routines (some of them also submitted by David M. Addison) as well as technical stuff like a printer driver. The game is written in ABasiC[2] which came packaged with the early versions of the Amiga 1000, being the starting point for many early hobby developers as there were no other languages available right after the start of the platform. Writing software for the Amiga in assembler must have seem a far to daunting task for most hobby developers, as I’m assuming experience with Motorola 68000 assembler wasn’t widespread yet (at least not compared to 6502 assembler). Added to that, the Amiga was marketed as a graphics computer, coming with its own sophisticated GUI operating system that made developing with a window-based development environment much more appealing to new users than going for bare metal hacking.

The most interesting aspect when talking about Monopoly clearly is that it apparently became an early case of legal actions taken against a non-commercial game developer by a large corporation for trademark reasons. The Parker Brothers seemingly didn’t care or just didn’t notice their games had been happily cloned on all popular home computer platforms before that point, and it was this exact game that was brought to their attention. Seems the company wasn’t too happy with Addison, who deemed the game part of the public domain, not only creating a game that was very detailed, but also featured the subtile “A Parker Brothers Game” on its loading screen. Thus, legal action ensued and the Parker Brothers mounted a “vigorous campaign to remove these programs from circulation”.[3]

So much about the lore. What about the game itself? I’d say it’s a reasonably good adaptation of the board game for a very early non-commercial game written in BASIC.

I guess the rules of Monopoly are well known, so I won’t go into detail here. The game plays out in a very similar fashion to the board game: Each player starts off with 1.500$. Each round, the computer rolls the dice for each computer player (which are called Andy, Betty, and Chip), the AI makes its moves, and then it’s your turn. You are presented with an action menu that allows you to buy properties, trade with other players, mortgage properties, and so on, depending on the situation. Most actions take place in the center of the board, sometimes you can click on properties, for example when trading or requesting information. Player properties are indicated by colored numbered player letters next to the streets. Mechanics like mortgaging when you’re out of money is done automatically for you.

One thing that annoyed me right from the start is you really have to make sure to click those little colored buttons on the choice screen the game opens in its center. You can’t click the text, you can’t click the option row, you have to hit these small buttons. Neither are key shortcuts available, at least not to my knowledge, which would make this a more convenient experience. Also, the game is fixed to 4 predefined players, including yourself. You can neither change the player number, nor their names or colors. It’s a bit strange the game is fixed to one human player, I imagine this could have been a fun multiplayer game. The AI seems reasonably competent, though I read it frequently cheats. I’m pretty bad at catching such errors so I can’t really comment on that.

The game is really specific about clicking those tiny buttons.

Programming:
Pretty well done for a BASIC game, and reasonably smooth as well, even as you see the options being drawn on the screen. I experienced some slight slowdowns at times, probably for calculations. The game seems stable, I didn’t encounter any bugs or crashes during my time with it. 4/10

Controls:
The game is completely mouse driven, which is understandable for an Amiga game built in BASIC on a GUI operating system. However, having to click on small buttons gets a bit tedious after a while, and the lack of keyboard shortcuts makes it even less convenient. 5/10

Vibe:
None. 0/10

Special fields sometimes feature nice animations, like this rotating police light. The game overdoes it with its exclamation marks at times…

Graphics:
Reasonably good for a BASIC rendition of Monopoly. Everything is clearly visible and uses a simple but effective color scheme, though the player tokens seem a little hard to distinguish at times. The dice animation are nice touch, also some of the special fields have little animations like a locomotive steaming by. I like that in-game descriptions highlight player and street names with their appropriate colors. 5/10

Story:
None. 0/10

Audio:
Very basic but effective sampled sounds for rolling the dice and player tokens moving around the board, or when buying houses. No music. To be honest, I rather have subtle sounds than annoying beeps and boops, or a noisy tune, like you’d probably get on other systems at that point in time. Just think about PC speakers… 3/10

Fun:
Admittedly, I find board games pretty boring, so I’m not the best person to judge this. That being said, I did have a quite bit of fun playing this, mostly because this was a smooth experience. I did lose embarrassingly, of course. 4/10

Final Rating: 21

Overall:
David M. Addison’s Monopoly is a solid rendition of the board game, especially considering it was written in BASIC on a fresh platform, and released as a non-commercial game. In fact, I think the Parker Brothers wouldn’t have made a better job at it themselves, especially not in 1985. Clearly, a lot of care and a good amount of skill went into this game, it’s a bit of a shame it got caught up in legal issues and was removed from circulation. Being a board game, I’d say this is more of a historical curiosity than a game I’d recommend to play today, unless you’re into early board game adaptations. Nice piece of Amiga history, though.

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1: I’m skipping a few source ports released earlier, like Hack and trek73.

2: Developed by a company called MetaComCo. Later versions of the computer came with the much more known Amiga Basic which, incidentally, was developed by none other then Microsoft.

3: Compute! January 1988, p.30