



Bob Morane is a name that means almost nothing in English and a great deal in French: the hero of a long series of Belgian adventure novels by Henri Vernes, later a comic strip as well. The games came from the French publisher Infogrames and are built unusually — they are not numbered sequels to one story but separate pieces named after the setting each of them takes place in. So Bob Morane : Chevalerie deals in knights, another disc in jungle, and Bob Morane : Océans goes underwater.
What they share is the shape: you work through illustrated scenes, gather and use objects, and are regularly dropped into an action stretch where thinking no longer helps and reflexes do.
The same games under other names
The catalogue keeps this line the way it was actually sold, which means several variants of the same thing. Bob Morane : Science Fiction sits beside the separately filed Bob Morane - Science Fiction 1, and the knight instalment is doubled the same way. The interesting one is Project Neptune: that is the name the underwater instalment carried outside the French-speaking market, where the hero's name would have sold nothing. Same design, repackaged without the licence.
That is what makes the series worth a look. It shows how the eighties dealt with a character whose fame stopped at a language border — in France and Belgium the name did the selling, everywhere else it had to be hidden.
Four of these records start in the browser here: the jungle adventure, the numbered editions of the knight and science-fiction instalments, and Project Neptune. The remaining three are catalogue profiles with descriptions and images.