Europ Agent

EuropAgent is Peter Schmocker's German-language educational game for the Macintosh, released in 1996 as 30-Swiss-Franc shareware. Macintosh Garden situates it "much in the vein of the popular Carmen Sandiego series": the player takes on a detective role and chases a thief across Europe by reading clues against atlases, encyclopedias, and reference books.

The detective premise

The author's pitch from the BinHex header (translated from the German original): the user steps into a detective's shoes and is tasked with recovering stolen goods. A pursuit criss-crosses Europe; targeted use of reference works and atlases is required to pin down the thief's current location. The goal is to catch the thief from as few clues as possible. "Unexpected situations loosen up the game."

Pedagogy first

Schmocker is explicit that the game is a learning programme dressed as a chase: the focus is the proper handling of information, with European geography knowledge as a side benefit. A range of difficulty settings supports both casual play and targeted exercises (e.g. coordinate reading) - useful for classroom deployment, which the multi-user pricing tier (60 CHF) implicitly targets.

Compatibility and language

Macintosh Garden lists System 7.0 or higher, with System 6.0.7 supported with minor graphics limitations. Hardware floor: a 9-inch monitor or larger, 800 KB free RAM, 1.5 MB disk, 68k binary. The game is German-only - the BinHex description openly notes "For the moment there is only a German version" and provides parallel English/German pitches.

Provenance

Author Peter Schmocker, contact P.Schmocker@popnet.ch. Shareware fees: 30 CHF single-user, 60 CHF multi-user (schools). Distributed as europ-agent-10-de.hqx under info-mac/game. Macintosh Garden mirrors the title at games/europagent with eight screenshots covering opening map, clue interface, and travel views.