Finders Keepers

Sales

According to the magazine Retro Gamer (issue #1), the game was Mastertronic's #4 best selling game (330.758 copies).

Development

David Jones was a huge fan of Tandy TRS-80. He was well known in the local Tandy shop due to his unique configuration of TRS-80 Model III equipped with two 180k disk drives and a massive 15 MB Hard Drive. The shop owner met him up with Albert Owen he was looking for people who could write games. Together they set up Procom Software in Essex and published their first game "Bonkers" which was fast paced Frogger clone for Spectrum. The next in line were programming utilities - Dynamic Graphics and Dynamic Programming. Nevertheless from the very beginning David was a huge fan of text adventures, particularly those of Scott Adams but he found it frustrating playing them on keyboard and the idea was to create an adventure game that could be controlled using a joystick. With this basic game concept and Albert's son Ray onboard as a graphics artist, it took David 12 weeks to write the finished game. Albert discussed yet the unnamed title with a few companies and it was Mastertronic who saw the potential and suggested a few additions such as monetary value of the objects. It resulted in the ability to combine and trade valuable objects for profit.

The title of the game was proposed by Mastertronic who thought that they can get some free publicity for using the same name as the madcap comedy - no matter they were completely unconnected.