The Adventures of Willy Beamish

The Adventures of Willy Beamish is a graphic adventure game from Dynamix, released by Sierra On-Line in 1991. Players control the title character, a nine-year-old boy, in a story that gently mocks adventure game conventions. It was notable for its graphics, which were designed to look like traditional hand-drawn cartoons. The game first came out for MS-DOS and the Amiga (on twelve 3.5-inch floppy disks), with a Sega CD port arriving in 1993. The CD versions added voice acting to the on-screen text and made a few other cosmetic tweaks. A sequel, which would have featured an older teenage Willy, was reportedly in the works but never finished. In March 2017, Activision re-released the game on GOG.com for Windows, bundled with DOSBox.

The plot follows nine-year-old Willy Beamish, a bratty kid from a typical upper-middle-class American family in the late 1980s. He loves sci-fi, hanging out in his tree house with friends, and playing his Nintari console (a blend of Nintendo and Atari). His life isn’t perfect: he’s tormented by school staff, a teenage bully named Spider, and his two sisters—Brianna, a preschool prodigy, and Tiffany, an angsty teen. His parents, Gordon and Sheila, are a career-focused dad and a glamorous soccer mom who love him but are fed up with his mischief, even considering military school. Willy’s grandfather’s ghost occasionally visits as his conscience. The story takes place over the first few days of summer vacation in the fictional town of Frumpton.

On the last day of school, Willy’s pet frog Horny disrupts the assembly by knocking off the principal’s toupee, landing Willy in detention. After getting out, he returns home to find his father Gordon, who expected a promotion, has been laid off. To save money, Willy is denied the entry fee for a video game championship he’s been training for, and his Nintari is locked away because of a “C” on his report card. He tricks his sister Tiffany into giving back the key. The next day, Willy learns that Tootsweet, a local artificial sweetener company, is sponsoring a frog-jumping contest with a cash prize. He decides to enter Horny. Meanwhile, Gordon applies for a PR job at Tootsweet. Neither knows that CEO Leona Humpford is conspiring with union leader Louis Stoole to start a plumbers’ strike, causing a sewer crisis for Leona’s profit, with the new PR head as the fall guy.