Gold Rush!

aka: Gold Rush! Classic
Moby ID: 440
DOS Specs
Buy on DOS
$58.00 used on eBay
Buy on Windows
$2.99 new on Steam
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Special Edition

Description official descriptions

In Gold Rush!, Jerrod Wilson (the player character) receives a letter from his long-lost brother (who fled the city years before when was hastily accused and convicted of a crime he didn't commit) asking him to join in Sacramento, California. If that's not enough for Jerrod sell everything and give his hometown Brooklyn a fond adieu, under the stamp was one of the first nuggets of Californian gold seen in the Atlantic shores of the United States. So, Jerrod bids farewell to his peaceful life as a newspaper editor, and becomes a fore-runner in the the great Gold Rush of 1849, hoping to find his brother and "strike gold" (literally).

Released late into the lifespan of Sierra's AGI engine, Gold Rush! features some tricks not seen before the more advanced SCI engine, such as enlarged characters, but it is best known for the three routes available to reach California: by land, travel by boat to reach the Atlantic shore of Panama, cross the isthmus, and then get a second boat in the Pacific shore, or making the dangerous all-boat trip by Cape Horn. Each route has its dangers: Cholera might strike as you make your way across the Northern states or your boat might sink. As usual with Sierra adventures, instant killing happens if the player is careless, but will also happen at random. Other important (and innovative) concept is the game being timed. If Jerrod takes too long to leave Brooklyn, passages to California increase in price, and his house devalues.

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Credits (DOS version)

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 69% (based on 9 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 70 ratings with 4 reviews)

This is my alltime favourite Sierra AGI game

The Good
The feeling of freedom, actually believing that you could basicly do anything. Pick the route myself to California. There storyline held all to the end, the graphics are the best I have seen when it compared to other games developed with the Sierra adventure game interpretor.

The Bad
The nasty disk error that i got when taking the boat to the West. Has nothing much to do with the game tho, more on how I treated my floppies in the 80s.

The Bottom Line
Is you liked the other Sierra games with the text input (Larry 1, Space Quest 1,2 etc) you'r gonna love this one. The puzzles and the adventure in this game kicks ass, I had more fun with this when I first played that I have with Quake 3 today.

DOS · by Mats Rade (29) · 2000

Would you be able to abandon your everyday life?

The Good
"Gold Rush", along with the "Manhunter" (mini)series and the AGI version of "King's Quest IV", was one of the last AGI games. Therefore it already has decent graphics - it still has resolution-related limitations, but certainly isn't as ugly as some of the earliest Sierra adventures. When first looking at the screenshots from this game, I didn't even notice it was AGI...
An aspect very often praised is the liberty the game offers, more precisely in its middle part - three routes you can use to get to California. It doesn't, however, have any influence on later gameplay - the only difference from the player's point of view is that the Panama route yields five points more. However on all routes you will get a Bible (which is later used to solve a code left by Jake) and on all routes you will lose all your money anyway, apart from a golden coin cleverly hidden in a pocket.
Some parts of the game are timed - the gold rush starts 14 minutes into the game and some things have to be done before, otherwise you won't be able to afford the trip to California since everyone wants to strike it rich and transport prices skyrocket. However, when you know what to do it isn't difficult to complete all necessary tasks - you can only have problems if you decide to read all epitaphs in the cemetery, as you can do in a few other games (I recall "King's Quest IV" and the AGD Interactive enhanced remake of "King's Quest II"). They aren't as poetic, chilling ("Reader, take warning by my fate, / Lest you should rue your case too late") or sometimes actually funny ("John Brown is filling his last cavity") like in "King's Quest IV", but still interesting to read. However, the timer can be cheated in an extremely simple way - by changing speed settings to something other than "Normal". It's often hard not to do it because character movement is so slow at normal speed...
However, what I find really captivating in this game is its emotional value. While still remaining a relatively simple adventure game (in terms of storyline), it offers a possibility to identify with the main character. Underneath his well-organized life he is hiding a deep yearning for his dead parents and lost brother. It makes his sudden decision to go to California more plausible - just one letter from his brother, awaited for many years, is able to make him abandon everything.

The Bad
Despite its emotional depth, the game is clearly lacking in terms of dialog. I don't think it would have been difficult to add some more... This part stops being plausible at once - such as in the scene when Jerrod suddenly quits his job and doesn't seem to offer any explanation.
Like many other Sierra games, "Gold Rush" also has its share of annoying random deaths. When sailing the Cape Horn route for the first time, I had to restore the game about five times since "we" finally managed to cross the treacherous waters. Sometimes you need to restore the game to a point before the departure from Brooklyn and then, when you have already seen vistas and read messages which appear during the journey, it would have been better if you could skip yet more of those parts. Non-interactive sequences on the ship or wagon last for several minutes - of course they aren't completely boring, they have some educational value, but after some time they aren't interesting anymore and strongly limit the game's replay value.
On the Cape Horn route there is a short scene when the timer really becomes a pain in the... The ship is running low on supplies and Jerrod catches some fish with his makeshift equipment. However, he has to gather all items and start fishing before he is too exhausted to do anything and it means you really have to be ultra-quick. It's not that easy in an AGI game which doesn't pause when you type...
The timer could have also been done better. The game would be more realistic and plausible if checking the timer wouldn't show time spent playing the game, but instead a time of day - for example if the game's beginning would be 4:15 pm and the gold rush started at half past 4.
Unfortunately, the game isn't bug-free - at least in my version it had a big bug which prevented me from completing the game shortly before the ending. The game just crashed shortly after entering the mine. However, at least in my version this bug can fortunately be bypassed by running the game in Scumm VM and not DOSbox. Scumm VM also seems to implement its own solutions in some way, which for example means that you have more save slots available.

The Bottom Line
Any adventure game satisfies some emotional needs by making the player identify more or less strongly with a character put in a situation which he or she is not likely ever to experience. "Gold Rush" appeals to a yearning which remains present in culture in some way: "if I could abandon all my life, start everything anew, just pursue adventure instead of living my boring everyday life...". Jerrod Wilson does it indeed in a fairly realistic game: he starts the day as a smart journalist in Brooklyn and finishes it on a ship or wagon bound to a faraway destination. It's not easy to imagine being in such a situation and I think many people wouldn't dare make such a decision - the game lets us do it through a "proxy" when we aren't likely to be put before such a choice.

DOS · by Nowhere Girl (8680) · 2013

From New York to California -- Getting there is half the fun!

The Good
In 1987, California patrol officer Jim Walls was hired by Sierra to create an realistic adventure game, encouraging players to use real police procedures to deal with the dangerous situations they faced. A year later, realism was also incorporated into a game that was created by Ken and Doug MacNeill, the brothers who were part of the King's Quest development team. This time, the game is based on the California gold rush in 1848.

Aptly named Gold Rush!, the game is set in Brooklyn Heights 1848 and we are introduced to Jerrod Wilson, a New York resident who wants to go to California and strike it rich. After the introduction, we are given a look at what players will experience during the game (via four windows). I think this is neat, as not many games around its time do that. Before Jerrod heads to California, he has to sell his house, quit his day job, and get ready for the journey ahead. Like Police Quest before it, it is based on real events. (The gold rush really took place in 1848, and there was indeed a President Polk that served at the time.)

Gold Rush! introduces many firsts as far as Sierra adventure games go. Although it was one of the last games to feature the aging AGI interface, it is the first to play a melody when you score a point, and this changes halfway through the game into a much longer one. It also features sprite-enlargement. In some scenes, for instance, Jerrod will become larger as he gets closer to the bottom of the screen, and an example of this is in his house.

What makes this game shine is that it was the first Sierra game to feature multiple paths. If you feel like it, you can get to California by sea (via Cape Horn or Panama) or by land (by signing up to the Joint Stock Mining Company). Due to the variety of routes, Gold Rush! is worth playing more than once. Regardless of the route you're taking, you have to do certain things beforehand, mainly by purchasing stuff that will help you get to Cali safely. During your trek, the game will point out certain locations and tell you about them, although you have the option to turn them off.

The graphics in the game are the best I ever seen in an AGI game. Everything (including the buildings and the characters) is drawn to reflect what they look like in the 1800's. Most of the music is blend in with the music common in that era and it actually sounds pretty good, especially if users already have a Tandy computer since the machine is capable of producing three voices instead of just one.

Another neat feature of Gold Rush! is the copy protection itself, which kicks in as soon as you start the game. Like most games, not just Sierra's, you are required to enter a specific word from the manual. If you type in the wrong word, the word "Gotcha!" is displayed and you are required to hang yourself. The same thing happens if you try to steel gold away from your fellow diggers. Nowhere in games from other companies have I seen this technique!

There are not a lot of puzzles in the game, just adventuring. The only one I faced was the cemetery puzzle, where you have to find out which room you have to go to in the hotel. If there are more puzzles, it shouldn't take you more than five minutes to complete.

The Bad
I hate the way that the game runs on a timer as soon as you start the game, and as soon as it expires you really can't do anything but load a previously saved game. This gets more frustrating if you make a few mistakes that cost you some time.

The Bottom Line
In conclusion, Gold Rush is an adventure game based on a series of events that happened during the California gold rush, and it is a game that allows you to travel to California using one of three different routes. Whichever way you go, you are offered a nice, big lecture about the area, or the history of it, as you pass through it. The nice graphics and sound effects just shows how Sierra's AGI interpreter has improved, leading up to the beginning of a new era for SCI0 games.

The MacNeills left Sierra a long time ago to form The Software Farm, and as part of its 10th anniversary, they decided to make Gold Rush! available on their web site. It is not a remake, but the original floppy disks shipped with a user manual and a large poster showing the three routes, all sealed in a wooden pencil box that I used to have at school. Their web site also encourages small companies to publish their software through them, but they were unsuccessful so far.

DOS · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2012

[ View all 4 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Running the game in Dosbox Nowhere Girl (8680) Jul 26, 2012

Trivia

Alternative Routes

Gold Rush! has an - for an adventure game - unusual replay value, as there are three different routes you can take to get to California. Each one of them offers its own puzzles and scenes.

Copy Protection

The game uses text from the manual to prevent software piracy. If the wrong word is entered, the player will be arrested and hanged on grounds of claim jumping.

Re-release

The designers re-released the game in 1998 as California Gold Rush!.

Technology

Although not the last Sierra adventure to use the AGI engine, Gold Rush! certainly tried pushing the old EGA technology to the limit. Certain scenes involve a much larger character walking around, something used much more convincingly in later SCI titles such as King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella.

Information also contributed by game nostalgia, nicholas mccolm and Ricky Derocher.

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Related Sites +

  • Crapshoot
    A humorous text on PC Gamer which talks about weird aspects of some games; including this one.
  • ScummVM
    supports the DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIgs versions of Gold Rush under Windows, Linux, Macintosh and other platforms.
  • Sunlight Games
    The independent game developer Sunlight Games re-released Gold Rush! News and media.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 440
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by MajorDad.

Amiga added by POMAH. Apple IIgs, Macintosh added by Kabushi. Atari ST added by Martin Smith. Apple II added by Terok Nor. Windows added by LepricahnsGold.

Additional contributors: uclafalcon, Macs Black, Renat Shagaliev, Patrick Bregger, Karsa Orlong.

Game added November 16, 1999. Last modified December 3, 2023.