orenronen posted:

Oh, an LP for this game. I have some insight about the developer that I don't think is readily available anywhere on the English web.

Makh-shevet ("מחשבת") was indeed an Israeli computing company in the '80s and '90s, and despite the comment at the very beginning of the LP they had the pixelated man logo from the very beginning, long before Lucasarts did. They were founded in a Kibbutz and focused on publishing programming tutorial books for kids. They had BASIC programming books earlier personal computers like the Commodore 64 before hitting it big with books aimed at the version of BASIC shipping with DOS-based PCs, which became very popular in the mid '80s (that was my own first computer and I had the Makh-shevet BASIC books with it -- I probably wouldn't have a career as a programmer if it wasn't for them, in fact). They branched out into more programming stuff, going as far as completely translating the Logo programming language into Hebrew, and also developed a couple of productivity applications for DOS in the late '80s.

At that point Israel was a country where game piracy was the norm. There was literally no legitimate market -- we had quite a few computer stores at that point, but they only stocked a minuscule number of imported games, often locked behind the counter, for very high prices for the very few people who were crazy and rich enough to buy them. In the late '80s and early '90s Makh-shevet, along with one or two other publishers, began to change that. They translated manuals and boxes for a wide variety of American and British games and published them for much cheaper than they used to be. In about a year or two they transformed the market - it's not that piracy was suddenly gone (it was very much still rampant), but it was much more acceptable to actually buy game software and computer stores had shelves of them. Makh-shevet was the only company who tried to go even farther and actually localize the games themselves. They did it for a few adventure games in the '90s, and they were actually not bad at it. They published translated Hebrew versions of Loom, Simon the Sorcerer and Dark Seed, among others.

In the mid '90s they tried game development, and that's where this game is coming from. They have a number of releases that never left Israel (some edutainment software and some actual games), and two that did - Master of Dimensions, their first serious adventure game, and Dementia, their second and last. The game actually have a third name - it's original one: It's called GrannyX in Israel.

Their game business obviously didn't go well - they merged with another company at the end of the '90s and soon after the brand disbanded.

I actually visited their offices back in the '90s. They published Day of the Tentacle for Lucasarts, and offered to upgrade floppy versions to CD ones. It was easier to go there rather than to mail my copy in, so I did and ended up with the special pyramid box for my troubles. Fitting for an office inside a Kibbutz, it was more of a large cluttered house that served as both a warehouse for their publishing operations and a development center.