Buick Dimensions
The Car Company Golf Sim Rabbit Hole
Adapted - and greatly expanded! - from this cohost post. It was last updated May 24, 2024.Over on my Cohost account, I dissected the 1992 Buick Dimensions catalog for some PC Speaker powered Smooth Jazz, extracted voice clips of talking food, and caused a friend to make a T-shirt out of it. But what's this all about, anyway? What does this have to do with... golf simulators? Well, buckle up, as it were, and I'll relate (what I can pull together of) the story of The Buick Dimension.
Our story begins well before the dawn of personal computing, in the year 1958. Buick - presumably a prominent brand of luxury (but not too luxury) automobiles among golfers - began sponsoring golf tournaments, starting at the Warwick Hills Golf and Club, near Grand Blanc, Michigan. Michigan, conveniently enough, was the seat of one General Motors, owners of the Buick brand. When the Buick Open had fallen off of the PGA Tour in 1969, Larry Mancour - pro golfer and native of nearby Flint, Michigan - rallied up the local Buick dealers to start the Little Buick Open until GM and the PGA brought the real Buick Open back into the Tour in '77. Some decades down the line, Buick would start up a few other tournaments, all of which would end up being part of the PGA Tour. The Buick Open in Warwick would continue being a Tour destination until 2009. the Buick Challenge, at Westchester Country Club in Harrison, New York, would run from 1967 until this day, though Buick would drop sponsorship of it after 2004, and would move away from Westchester in 2008. In 1992, Buick began sponsoring the Buick Invitational, at the Torrey Pines in San Diego, California, and remain its sponsor until 2010, when Farmers Insurance assumed the mantle.
I guarantee you, some of this information is going to come up again.
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| The Buick Dimension, 1987, on a 3.5 inch floppy disk. The cover consists of a pink wireframe, with pink and cyan geometric shapes arranged haphazardly across it. Photo from eBay user siamjane8. |
In 1986, car manufacturers were experimenting with wild new ways to market their cars. Television and radio ads could only do so much to describe the experience of driving a car, and had only a limited amount of time to explain the particulars of their deals. Paper catalogs had all kinds of space for the raw numbers, glossy photographs, and neat diagrams, but they couldn't just mail them out willy-nilly, and for the sheer amount of information they'd need to contain, they'd end up rather thick and awkward to cross-reference. Personal computing was finally the "in" thing around that time, and a floppy disk was an awful lot cheaper to mail out than a hundred-page brochure. That would be what The SoftAd Group was banking on, when they offered their services to General Motors.
Initially launching for the 1987 model year, The Buick Dimension was produced by electronic marketing firm, The SoftAd Group (now ChannelNet). It is a digital equivalent to what you would normally have mail-ordered: a complete brochure detailing all of the specifications and features of the newest vehicles. These disks were mailed out for Apple II, MS-DOS, and Macintosh platforms, and in multiple disk sizes over the years. By way of animations, hypertext, interactive charts and graphs, and the occasional sound effect, you could get all the information you could ever want about buying a new 1987 Buick - even have the program print you a coupon for a free test drive. (Was that something you ever had to pay for, before?)
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| "Here's your Great American Road Test." The 1988 edition of Buick Dimensions in its original mailer. Photo from eBay user afvet63. |
Now, if this sounds somewhat familiar, maybe you've played around with The SoftAd Group's Ford Simulator from the same year (or any of its follow-ups from later years). The SoftAd Group were certainly offering their services around, but Ford Simulator - which launched the year after The Buick Dimension - actually went the extra mile of letting customers digitally test-drive the new Fords on their computers. Sure, the driving isn't particularly realistic - certainly not enough to give you a feel for actually driving a car - but it was a step up from what The SoftAd Group had done for GM, even if it does come off as a knock-off of Accolade's Test Drive that came out the same year. And you couldn't exactly complain about the cost of Free (well, Free as long as you'd requested the mailer, or knew somebody who had).
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| "The All-New 1991 Buick Park Avenue" - 1991's Buick Dimensions on 5.25" floppy disk. Photo from eBay user eyetimer." |
So what could Buick do to outdo Ford? Well, a lot of things. By 1990 (for the 1991 model year), General Motors had begun working with The InMar Group for newer editions of Buick Dimensions. With their prominent sponsorships of golf tournaments, and the increasing popularity of computer golf simulators (Access Software's Links: The Challenge of Golf had just launched that year, to rave reviews and several awards), Buick were neatly situated between the two worlds of golfing and computing. So for 1991's Buick Dimensions, they would include the Buick Classic, a tiny golf simulator minigame that would allow would-be car-owners (and up to 3 associates) the chance to play the front nine holes at Westchester Country Club, as would be featured in that year's PGA Tour.
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| 1990 Buick Classic at the Westchester Country Club. Screenshot from MobyGames user piltdown_man. |
All considered, Buick Classic (available at the Internet Archive is a fairly serviceable little golf sim, with a horizontal, three-click swing meter reminiscent of the Jack Nicklaus games. The low-color graphics wouldn't exactly dethrone Links, and the game also lacks that game's ritzy digitized sounds, but it was meant to fit on a single floppy disk and run on the average 8086-powered potato. The same went for the Macintosh version, which was intended to run on basically any Macintosh available in 1991, on memory configurations as small as 512k, and with or without support for color. (It's actually quite pretty in black and white, if you ask me.)
But weirdly, the next editions of Buick Dimensions would not include any mention of golf. The 1992 edition - now newly designed to take advantage of VGA cards, and using Access Software's RealSound driver to play digitized sound - would toss the golf simulator in favor of a guide about the USDA Food Guide Pyramid, which had just been introduced that year, and the 1993 edition would celebrate Buick's centennial with a history trivia game.
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| Buick Dimensions, 1991 and 1992 editions, on 3.5 inch floppy disks. These are the Macintosh Plus versions. |
But the golf simulator would make a return appearance for the 1994 model year. The InMar Group would add an updated golf simulator to Buick Dimensions' 1994 edition, supporting higher resolution VGA, mouse controls, generally just spruced up all around. This time, you (and up to 3 other players) face the front nine holes at Warwick Hills Golf & Country Club for the 1994 Buick Open, a much woodsier area than Westchester that gets to leverage the new engine by drawing a lot more trees on screen. I mean, by 1994, you had Links 386 Pro claiming the crown, but again, this game had to fit on a single disk. If you'd like to try this one out, it's on the Internet Archive to run in your web browser.
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| 1994 Buick Classic. Screenshot from Internet Archive uploader GamePlayer123. |
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| 1994 Cadillac Impressions. Screenshot from MobyGames user Hervé Piton. |
That same year, a very similar golf simulation would be added to another GM brand's digital catalog, 1994's Cadillac Impressions. I have yet to find a copy of this disk on eBay, but it is also available at Internet Archive. This looks like a further refinement of the golf simulator from 1994's Buick Dimensions, with added (text) commentary from golfing great Lee Trevino (he of Fighting Golf fame, if you're a retro gamer), and set at the Doral Resort and Country Club's "Blue Monster." Historical item of note: this simulation was created 18 years before the country club was bought and renamed by Home Alone 2 star Donald Trump, and became the subject of quite a lot of lawsuits. Perhaps the Doral was in better shape in 1994.
Anyway the long-and-short of this rabbit hole is that I want to own the full set of these disks and identify the exact years they were sent out, and probably target the Macintosh versions because a bunch of the later ones have not been digitally preserved. (And as another weird assed cornerstone for Golfshrine...)
But of course, this isn't the last time Buick would be associated with a golf simulation. This is.
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| EA Sports Buick PGA Tour Courses, an expansion disc for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2000, alongside the game it requires to run, both in big boxes from the Golfshrine collection proper. | Michael Jordan (yes, that Michael Jordan), putting for double bogey, on Torrey Pines' second hole. |
This is Buick PGA Tour Courses, an expansion disc for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2000 for Windows, which adds three golf courses that Buick sponsored for the 1999 PGA Tour: the Buick Challenge at Callaway Gardens, the Buick Open at Warwick Hills, and the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines South. And because this is an expansion pack for a PC game, it shipped in a big box, the same size as the actual game!
As near as I can tell - knock on wood - that's the last time Buick would ever sponsor a golf computer game product. I am still missing 1994 Dimensions and that Cadillac Impressions disk; the former is a bit more expensive than it ought to be (I'm seeing prices between $25 and $35 on eBay as of this writing), and the latter has yet to ever turn up. I'm kinda just happy to have the big thing in the collection for now, but if anybody has good leads on those remaining disks, or tips about any other things that might come up along the way, please do get in touch via the usual vectors.