1986 Jens and Mattias Thorsen
Platform: Sinclair QL
Our first ever Sinclair QL title into the unreleased games archive which is Games That Weren’t, and thanks to Anonymous Contributor for the heads up. Much of the following is based from their contribution.
Bar National was an 1980s club-life simulator that was created by Swedish brothers Jens and Mattias Thorsen. Jens eventually went on to make his mark during the mid-1990s, as the main person behind the hugely successful Backpacker series of games in Sweden.
Jens had done some programming in the early 1980s, and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s when Jens was a student at a technical college in Sweden, and the computer bug really bit. Together with his brother Mattias, he created “Bar National” on the Sinclair QL.
The game was finished but never released to the public, only to a few friends. Jens mentions the game on a 1997 homepage for his then company Tati:
“Personally, it took until 1986 when me and my younger brother Mattias made Bar National, a simulation game for the Sinclair QL. Bar National is best likened to a virtual night out at a club and was very popular among my closest friends, primarily due to closely resembling real life.”
In 2018, a journalist did some research on the game in a general article on Jens and Backpacker:
“Jens is also caught up [in the mid-1980s trend to create text adventure games], but does so in his own way. Younger brother Mattias is called in and draws the graphics. The game is named Bar National.
-I made a game about being on a night out at a club. It had an extreme amount of characters, like 25 of them, who were able to do various things at the club.I found it far more rewarding to program characters than coding environments to explore. I guess I’ve always enjoyed making my own games which are not just copies of an already existing game – that doesn’t interest me at all. There are others who are better at making improvements and developing existing concepts.
When schoolmates and friends test Bar National they find the game strange since it differs markedly from the way conventional adventure games are constructed. Sinclair QL does not meet with much success in Sweden and the game is never widely distributed.”
Nothing much else is known about the game at this stage. Jens runs his own company called Funkis Multimedia, so we hope to learn more soon from them and what the chances could be of the game being digitally preserved.
If you know anything more about this title – please do let us know. With thanks to Anonymous Contributor for the suggestion to cover.
