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The first thing you notice about Millionaire is that it crashes very soon after it has loaded if you have a disc drive attached. So disconnect all the interesting bits of your system and try again. This time, you should get past the loading screen, of two buildings grazing in a field, and see a large telephone appear on the screen.

The purpose of the telephone is unclear, except that it gives a reasonable imitation of a phone ringing. This screen tells me I have a home computer, on which I have written a program. I have five hundred pounds which I am willing to invest in my game and depending on the course of action I take and the decisions I make, I will either become a millionaire or go bankrupt.

The game is basically the application of a new idea to an old format. There are two graphical bits to brighten up the boring old text. These are, pictures of your current dwelling, depending upon how you are doing, and a barchart showing how many peasants have died. Oops, I mean how many tapes you have sold.

The sort of options that you have in the game are; how much you spend on advertising and duplicating. How many copies you duplicate and whether you put most effort into producing new programs or selling or converting existing ones. Being a one-employee company, you cannot fire anyone, unfortunately, but you are allowed to wind up magazine editors. [Eh? -Ed]

Millionaire may appeal to budding software entrepreneurs or people interested in this kind of financial simulation. It is not the best example of this kind of program and you may get more enjoyment from one of the many games, that follow this format, that can be found in just about every computer publication from the year dot. The major fault of this program is, that it gives no information about how it arrived at the monthly sales result, making it difficult to adjust your decisions and improve your score.

According to this game, it takes exactly one month to produce a marketable program. I shall let you draw your own conclusions.