MaxIt

Playing Maxit is fairly easy.

The game is played on a board divided into eight rows and eight columns or 64 fields. In all but one of those fields a number is placed. These numbers are picked at random from a pre-defined set ranging from –9 to 15. On the last remaining position, the Maxit cursor will be placed.

The cursor indicates the row on the board from which you, the player, will have to select one field. The value of the field you choose will be added to your score. Don't forget that some fields contain negative numbers. After you've chosen a field the Maxit cursor will be moved to it and the previous position of the cursor will be emptied.

Now it's the computers turn. The computer will have to choose a field in the column where you placed the Maxit cursor. The number the computer picks will be added to its score and the cursor will be moved to the corresponding position. After that it's your turn again.

This goes on until the computer can't make a move anymore. — from Guido Klemans' help file

MaxIt was originally coded in BASIC for the Commodore PET by Harry J. Saal in 1981 and distributed by Cursor Magazine. 1982 it was ported to IBM by Patrick Leabo, keeping the 40-column text mode. It made its way across all the platforms of the day. Commodore 64 Fun and Games, a 1984 book by Ron Jeffries and Glen Fisher, contained it as an example. In 1989 it was rewritten by Owen Gwilliams and given a nicer 80-column interface. The same year saw the first game that used the concept under a different name: Blue Angel 69.

Blue Angel 69 was the first graphic adaptation of MaxIt. It used colors instead of the minus sign to discern positive and negative numbers and slightly altered the number range, which was now 1–11 for both positive and negative numbers, with no zeros. Mainly Blue Angel 69 capitalized on the fact that MaxIt is well fit to slowly reveal pictures during gameplay. In this case, the pictures were Hajime Sorayama's sexy robots. I suppose it was called Blue Angel 69 because the pics were tinted blue, especially in the 16-bit versions.

Three years later Blue Angel 69 was remade as Sexy Droids for Amiga and PC only. The two games are mostly identical, only the graphics are different. Sexy Droids was licensed by Penthouse and released as Penthouse Hot Numbers featuring models of this magazine. The same year saw Murmel, a not overly ambitious, but nicely done implementation by Jeff Anderson.

Another three years later, there was Erotica, another C64 game in the vein of Blue Angel 69, but less well done. And this, more or less, ends the career of MaxIt as a template for other games. There have been remakes on various platforms, but no other games based on the same concept, which is a pity, for it is a good concept.

Blue Angel 69						89
MaxIt								Owen Gwilliams
Cromo						90		Harald Breitmaier
Sexy Droids						92
Addix								Adrian Millett
Murmel								Jeff Anderson
Crosso						94
Erotica						95
Blue Angel '69 Remake								Uros Sajko
Maxit for Windows								Guido Klemans
Maxit 2.1								Eugene S. Schulze
Numerománie						97		Petr Václavek
Maxit						02		Alexey Egoshin