Reviews

Millionaire:
A management game that used a distinctive font (vertually all games at this time used the standard font).
Lots of decision making but with a small amount of luck required if you choose the quicker but more dubious route to success. Reward comes in the shape of financial gain represented by the property you own ie from a terrace house to a mansion.
For a management game it was pleasing to the eye and provided you with enough choices to determine your future but not too many choices to make it tedious.
And there was always Honest Harry to provide an alternative route to success, if your luck was in.

Colorful and attractive program about managing a software company .

Interesting enough to keep you entertained for a while .

The presentation is cool and very 80´s ... charming and innocent . a real delight ! !

Decision making at its best !

Enduringly popular strategy game with those who knew it back in 1984.
Millionaire sets you out to start up a software business with the target of big money.
It differs from many Spectrum business management games by bieng:
- relatively rapid in its calculations
- graphically quite appealing. Its looks even generated on of the more pointless Tipshop maps you are likely to witness.
- strategic
Yep, whilst most Spectrum strategy games lack any real strategy, boiling down to guess the number I'm thinking of, Millionaire does take a bit of working out and with a sense of humour too.
The major negative is the limited options. Every round is so similar and even Honest Harry, a kind of wheeler-dealer gamble you can make - has only 4 or 5 offers for you.
It seems a strange lack of inspiration for a game that had tried so hard to be witty and playable, but rinse and repeat makes the initial appeal wear off rapidly. Don Priestly's peerless 1983 strategy Dictator shows how much more might have been crammed into Millionaire to give it much longer lasting appeal.

1984 Incentive Software (UK)
by John Hunt

For my 1000 review I have chosen... Millionaire. I was saving that game for my millionth review but there aren't so many games to review, so here it goes.
My one thousand review:

I'll start by saying that this wasn't a game I played as a young boy back in the 80's. I would have loved it, though, like I do love a lot of this strategy games, but I didn't played back then. It's not new to me either, since the Spectrum retro scene as been around for more than the actual commercial period of this little machine, and so I'm acquainted with the game for a few years now thru emulators.
Strangely until 1987 most strategy games were written in BASIC. Why no one used a faster freer language, still bugs me to this days. Nevertheless, Football Manager, The Biz, Dictator, amongst others, are some of my favorites games ever. The possibility of breaking into the programs and scour its secrets has always fascinated me.

Millionaire is based around the idea of owning a home brew software label and marketing your own programs and getting rich out of it. Yep, we all dreamed of it. Even if only thru computer games like Millionaire.
The game contains all the "cute" elements from other similar games, including Honest Harry, who is probably the refined brother of Derby Day's Honest Clive, and some quirky humour found subtly scattered around the many texts. But also pushes you to think a bit beyond the fast action of the so common shoot 'em ups of that time. There are decisions to make and actions to take, which will influence the course of the game, and determine your final score.
Graphically is very appealing, the mansions, which get bigger and fancier while you get richer, are very well drawn and fun to look at.
The only letdown is it does tend to get a bit repetitive after a while, unlike Soccer management games which have the competitive side making them more appealing and addictive. Still, this is with no doubt a great game, and very original and well made for 1984.


4,5 points

It's quite good for what it tries to be but it's too much of the same to me and you wind up repeating the same options over and over again which can get pretty boring. It's ain't bad, it just won't take long for the fun to drain away.

I bought this when it first came out, and it kept me occupied for a few weeks. You are the owner of a software house trying to be the new Ultimate. At the start you decide if you want to specialise in a certain type of game and also the general qualities of your software (originality, playability etc). Each month you have the options to write games, port to another computer, manufacture tapes, and book advertising. At the end of the month you see how well you've done with sales and profit. There is also a character called Honest Harry who can throw a few iffy games your way, but beware as sometimes the law catches up with you.

I'd say this game hasn't aged well, and suffers from menu syndrome where you become acutely aware you're just playing a repeating loop of options. The menu of one-off options to boost sales is particularly baffling (You can only get your games reviewed one time only? Really??). There's also the simplicity. You can't name individual games or make any development decisions about them. Once released you don't get reviews or any sort of feedback. They are just out there, and the individual success/failure of each game is anyone's guess apart from total sales figures.The only thing that seems to make much difference to sales is how much you spend on advertising, which is maybe not that far off real-life I guess, but even massively advertised games tended to fail if they were rubbish. I easily got to move into the mansion and despite things getting harder over time,I still ran at a profit before I sold-up out of boredom. It's okay, but to my mind, Addictive's Software Star is a much more detailed and involved game and is far better for it.