Licensed games were extremely common in the 80s and 90s and it seemed like every tv show and movie had a game based on it. It was often the case that publishers would go ahead and announce a game before the licensing deal was even finalized, which caused many tie-ins that were announced on the pages of gaming magazines to disappear quickly and make players wonder what became of them. This was assumed to be the case with Sharedatata’s Married… with Children game, which was supposed to be a point-and-click adventure game based on the show.
However, it turns out that this time the game was real. Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation, has finally found proof that the game existed and that work was being done on it. Cifaldi posted a picture of an old PCGames issue featuring an image of Peggy in the Bundy family’s living room, which showed off the “outstanding VGA graphics” documented at the time and a set of verbs including one curiously listed as “invent”.
Omg, I just found a screenshot of the lost "Married…With Children" point and click adventure game, I had no idea this was real and not just a licensing announcement pic.twitter.com/hPItGwJgoK
— Frank Cifaldi (Sleepy).exe (@frankcifaldi) December 15, 2022
Cifaldi later followed up and said
“I want you all to know that I have done nothing these past five hours but try to figure out who made this game and I think I’m close. If you are a @GameHistoryOrg donor I hope this is exactly what you want me doing with my time.
“So I found the producer’s name in a magazine, realized they misspelled it, found the real name on MobyGames, found his Wikipedia entry, and found out he, unfortunately, died 10 years ago. And the reference for his death was an obituary…written by me. The world is small.”
TimeExtention did some digging and found that the game was announced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1990 for ShareData’s premium line of Monarch video games and was originally PC-only and was compared to Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry series and LucasArts adventure games. The game’s producer Christopher Erhardt described the interface in Computer Gaming World as:
“As simple as Lucasfilm’s Maniac Mansion, so the player can direct the characters as easily as Peg manipulates Al’s Wallet”
The game was scheduled for a June 1990 release but ShareData switched to developing NES games and intended to bring the title to the NES but nothing ended up happening.