LA Law: The Computer Game

LA Law: The Computer Game is a computer adaptation of the American television series about a law firm, released for the PC in 1992. Licences of this kind were routine in the early nineties: publishers bought the rights to popular shows and built games on them aimed more at viewers than at gamers.

A legal setting supplies a clear framework. The player takes on cases, chooses an approach, gathers material and then argues in court, where the selection of questions and arguments decides the outcome. Most games of this shape rest on text and menu choices, because a trial is a chain of decisions rather than action.

1992 was a period when text-heavy games with static screens were doing well on the PC. A sound card was still an optional extra, while VGA graphics allowed considerably more detailed screens than before, so titles could afford character portraits and an elaborate interface.

Adapting a familiar brand carried one commercial advantage at the time: buyers knew what subject they were getting even when they knew nothing about the underlying system.

The market for television tie-in games had a short life. Once development costs rose at the end of the nineties, building a whole title around a brand the audience knew only from the screen stopped paying off, which leaves games like this as evidence of one narrow period.

You can open this courtroom experiment directly in your browser on OldGame.cz and see how practising law looked in 1992.