Links Tour Player Add-ons

And how I can't put a pointless mystery to bed

Originally posted to my Cohost, adapted very slightly to Golfshrine in the wake of Cohost's imminent closure.

For almost as long as golf has been played on computers, golf games have generally been built to accept add-on courses. I've been told this stretches all the way back to golf games on Plato. It seems like a fairly obvious move for courses to eventually be sold separately, to extend the lifetime of a popular commercial golf sim. So, naturally, the Links series (and I think even its immediate predecessor, Leader Board) has always had an ongoing line of Championship Course disks. Dozens of add-on courses, most being digitized versions of real courses, but at least one being a "Fantasy Course" (Devil's Island in French Guiana, which has never had a golf course built on it to my knowledge).

Somewhere around the introduction of the Links LS series in 1996-1997, Access Software began to introduce the Tour Player Series. These add-ons would include a whole new, live-action golfer animation set of a famous golfer, enable you to play on their home course, and add that golfer as a computer opponent, in addition to whatever extra multimedia stuff is on the disc. In Arnold Palmer's case, you are given the chance to wander around Arnold's office at Latrobe Country Club, look at all of his trophies, and listen to him narrate his glory days, in first-person 3D, using the same graphics engine as Access Software's Tex Murphy games.

As far as I can tell, though, Access only ever released two of these, and I cannot tell if Arnold Palmer was ever sold separately from Links LS.

My copy of Links LS 1997. The top-left corner indicates Arnold is included with the game.

See, when I came to own my complete-in-box Links LS 1997 edition as part of Golfshrine, I made a note that my copy seemed to be a later-print edition that featured Arnold on the box. The game discs were organized in a double-jewelcase as such:

So, okay, I must have gotten a package deal with this one. But I kept looking to see if I could find a Links LS that was released without Arnold in it - while I found numerous complete-in-box examples of just Links LS, all of them showed the CD case removed from its box, containing the Arnold disc.

Links LS Tour Player: Arnold Palmer at Latrobe Country Club. Photo by eBay seller nostalgia_overload16..

So I started surfing eBay, specifically looking for the Arnold Palmer add-on by itself. I did find a few examples (such as the one in the above pictures). The big-box does even specify, in the bottom-left, that Arnold Palmer "requires Links LS." Except that further examination of the listing reveals that the Arnold box happens to include the full three-disc version of Links LS. It is no different a package from Links LS itself.

Complicating things even further is that I keep finding listings of both Links LS and the Arnold Palmer box together, where the two appear to be joined at the hip (or are perhaps shrinkwrapped together). One instance of them appeared to be opened, but still attached by their corners through what I can only assume is one of those cute little cardboard hinges, like I'd often see on Interplay's dual-jewel budget releases (just, in this case, they're full sized boxes). And the CD case in the photographs on that listing was... the exact same 3-disc copy of Links LS with the Arnold disc, in that same double-case.

Links Tour Player Add-On: Davis Love III at Sea Island - The Cloister. Photo by eBay user pw49.

Even beyond Arnie, though, I'm only aware of one Tour Player add-on being produced after the fact - Davis Love III, at Sea Island's Cloister. I don't know the extent of what multimedia features are available for him. I'd ideally like to own a copy of it that hasn't been scribbled on. But Golfshrine is on a budget this month, and if I'm going to get to the bottom of any mystery, it's "was Arnold Palmer ever really a separate product?" And I'm tentatively leaning towards, "no, he never was." So what the hell.

It's clear, though, that Access had big plans for this kind of thing, as the menu system in LS 1998 goes on at great length about the kinds of add-on packs they had planned. Pro players, more resort tours (like the Kapalua tour included with LS), celebrity appearances. Perhaps they were hoping to introduce another comedy commentator, like 386 CD's Bobcat Goldthwait?

Related thought: Links did not have computer players until LS.

Links, one of the most successful computer golf sim series of all time, had no career or tournament modes for the first several years of its life. It had no AI opponent at all until LS. You either played by yourself, or played with another human.

Or you could play against yourself.

Links 386 Pro had a feature where you could record your game and save it to disk, and then add that recording as a player in your next game. This does come with limitations, most notably that you need to completely disable the wind, but it means that you (or, really, anybody else) can play against a ghost of a previous game.

Links Pro CD's "Add Players" menu, with the option to use a recorded player as a participant in a game.

I wonder if this is why the Tour Player Add-on was created. Links LS does introduce AI golfers, and perhaps it would have been an amazing selling point to computer golf enthusiasts to be allowed to hit the course against a famous player's actual game. And yet, only one of them was ever actually sold? Even with a unique course attached to it...