Publisher(s) Electronic Arts Mode(s) Single-player | Release 1986 | |
Designer(s) Evan Robinson
Nicky Robinson
Paul Reiche III Platform(s) Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple IIGS, DOS Genre(s) Traditional golf simulation | ||
World Tour Golf (WTG) is an 1986 computer game by Evan and Nicky Robinson, Paul Reiche III and published by Electronic Arts (EA) for Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple IIGS and DOS.
Contents
Summary
When the Robinsons and Reiche completed work on Mail Order Monsters in 1985, the video games industry had crashed and they were unsure about what kind of game they wanted to develop next. Developers and producers at EA at the time were playing Nintendo Golf, and the emerging power of MS-DOS-based PC games led the two programmers to undertake an ambitious golf game that would include a sophisticated golf course editor.
Evan Robinson worked on the game and graphics code (which was adapted from code written by Dan Silva for an internal EA editor named Prism, which eventually became Deluxe Paint) for WTG, while Nicky Robinson created the editor and Paul Reiche acted as game designer and artist. In 1986 it was unusual for a game to have more than one programmer, and this gave them an easy way to neatly subdivide the work. It also allowed WTG to be a significantly larger game in scope than many contemporary titles. The editor supported the accurate (for its day) re-creation of real golf courses, as well as comical courses that were made up of a series of islands, 270-degree doglegs, etc. This followed in the spirit of Racing Destruction Set, which had been developed at EA the year before.
EA had expected the game to do reasonably well, but it became a hit and received a Software Publishers Association Gold Disk award for sales.
World Tour Golf was EA's second sports title and its second sports hit, and it represents a link in the chain that led to the founding of EA Sports. Madden NFL was already in its early stages of development when World Tour Golf shipped. Don Daglow, who produced WTG, teamed with programmer Eddie Dombrower to create hall of fame title Earl Weaver Baseball the following year. When Richard Hilleman and Scott Orr turned the initially unsuccessful Madden franchise into a hit in 1991 the company created the separate EA Sports brand.
Reception
Compute! called World Tour Golf "a great game for the novice and the expert". The game was reviewed in 1988 in Dragon #132 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 4½ out of 5 stars.