WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Links: The Challenge of Golf

Publisher: Virgin Interactive Developer: Papyrus Design Group Release: 1994

Golf games are something I never really paid attention to back in the 90s, though as I've started to take a look back at classic game libraries I've started to realize that they were one of the genres that could be used as a measure of success in Japan. The more golf games your system had, the more popular it was in the Land of the Rising Sun.

The Mega Drive and Mega CD did not have a lot of golf games...at least not that were developed in Japan.

In fact, Links: The Challenge of Golf is the only golf game on the Sega CD as far as I know. While Electronic Arts released a few of their sports games on the system (NHL, College Football), their PGA Tour series never made the jump.

Links is actually a part of a much bigger series by Access Games. The Salt Lake City developer which was founded in 1982 also did adventure games. In fact, it was an early adopter of CD-ROM technology when it released Under a Killing Moon, the third game in its Tex Murphy series.

But what Access was best-known for was its series of realistic golf simulators. I don't know if its Leader Board Golf game was the first realistic golf simulator on the PC, but it had to be one of the front runners.

Links gives the player 36 authentic holes from the historic Torrey Pines golf course in San Diego, rendered in meticulous (for the time) detail using a ridiculous amount of reference material. It was actually plastered on the back of the manual: 500 shots, video of the entire course, topographical maps, weather history and prevailing winds, proper vegetation, etc.

The result is something the Sega CD can barely handle. Each and every time you move to a new position on the course, you have to sit and wait while the system struggles to re-draw all of this detail. Even rotating your view results in a loading screen.

Game play is just as clunky. The game was meant to be played with a mouse, and so navigating with a controller can be a bit awkward. To the developers' credit, though, the pointer will jump to hotspots rather than drag slowly across the screen, so there's that.

Or, if you were one of the few people to own a Sega Mega Mouse (yes, that is a thing), Links is totally compatible with that.

Or (!) if you were one of the even fewer people to own the barely-remembered TeeV Golf peripheral, Links is totally compatible with that as well. TeeV Golf was a Club-shaped controller that you swung at your television. A sensor picked up the motion and translated it into the game. Apparently it worked quite well, too. When I was working in retail I had some regular customers who swore by this thing. And you thought Wii Sports was so original!

The Links series ran up until 2004, with the final game appearing on the Xbox. Microsoft bought the company in 1999, and put it to work not only on the final Links game, but on Top Spin and the Amped snowboarding series as well under their new name, Indie.

In 2004 Indie was sold to Take 2 Interactive and was folded into the 2K Sports label and getting renamed to Indie Built. In 2006 the studio was suddenly closed with no reason given.

Bit more trivia – Links on the Sega CD is one of the very few non-racing games developed by Papyrus, better known for games like Indy 500 and NASCAR Racing. Early on in the studio's history it did a bit of contract development in order to keep the lights on. This would appear to be one of those contracts. Of course, the people and technology of Papyrus form the core of the iRacing online service today.