[deluxe music plays]
[computer beeps, drive buzzes]
Greetings, folks! And y’know?
For as much attention as vintage hardware and retro games receive on channels like LGR,
sometimes I think back on my youth and recall the stretches of time on the computer
in *between* playing games.
Times before we had an internet connection, where I was bored with all my shareware and
found myself piddling around with random programs on the family PC.
I often ended up farting around in Windows 3.1 with something like Paintbrush, idling
away an afternoon drawing delightful digital doodles with the mouse.
And it wasn’t long before that gave way to an even better time waster.
Print Shop Deluxe.
Yeah man, as far as unconventional computer entertainment goes,
preteen me found this oddly engaging.
Just makin’ up all kinds of random signs, banners, cards, and calendars,
for no other reason than because I could.
I didn’t even have to use Print Shop to print anything, shops or otherwise.
Usually it was fulfilling enough to spend my time admiring all that colorful clipart
it came with, and those awesome bendable TrueType fonts with their dithered psychedelic gradients.
Especially since we only had a monochrome dot matrix printer back then, so looking at
the on-screen preview imagery was the only way I could see my creations in color.
Even the Graphics Reference Booklet that came inside the box was printed in black and white,
so I just couldn’t catch a colorful break.
Whatever, I spent tons of time thumbing through this as well, I don’t even know why exactly.
I loved flipping through my parents’ clipart books as a kid too, but with those the whole
idea was to clip them out, paste them together on a sheet,
and use a copy machine to assemble them.
'Cuz yeah, clipart.
But Print Shop’s digital clipart, ahh how awesome was that.
You could do the same thing with it, but without all the cutting and pasting!
I mean, physically anyway, you still cut and paste through the software’s user interface
but y’know what I mean.
And I remember being especially fond of the “PSD Modern Living” graphics, with
all the coolest tech like cassette tapes and CD players, compact Macs, fax machines, rolls
of film, pay phones and VHS camcorders.
I’d print out pages of those and cut them out, making my own little paper collection
of cutting edge technology.
Truly, we were living in the future.
And this was all thanks to the brilliance of Broderbund Software.
If you were a computer user from the early 80s to the late 90s, chances are you had one
of their programs within arm’s reach.
To some, the name is synonymous with their computer games, like Where in the World is
Carmen San Diego, Lode Runner, Karateka, and Ancient Art of War.
But Broderbund’s productivity and creative applications
were just as popular, if not more so.
Software like Bank Street Writer, Animate, Dazzle Draw, and of course, The Print Shop.
Initially released for the Apple II in 1984, The Print Shop was practically an overnight
success story, cementing its place in the top ten best-seller charts for Apple II software,
and remaining high up there for years on other computing platforms.
And it’s no wonder, since with the rise of increasingly capable and more affordable
printers, desktop publishing was becoming a huge selling point for home computers.
The Print Shop made it quick and easy to create visually complex signs,
letterheads, banners, and greeting cards.
And its included library of borders, fonts, and clipart-style graphics were fantastic
to have included right out of the box.
Much of this was already possible with separate software packages, but The Print Shop did
it all in one spot and exceptionally well, making for one seriously attractive purchase
for schools, small businesses, and home users alike.
And according to some in the industry, The Print Shop was also perhaps the most-pirated
C64 software of 1985, right alongside Activision’s Ghostbusters, even with on-disk copy protection.
Despite this high honor, it still went on to sell over a million units by 1988,
prompting an onslaught of add-ons and updates.
You had The Print Shop Companion, adding new graphics editors, fonts and borders,
and a charming little Creature Maker minigame.
There was also the Print Shop Graphics Libraries, adding hundreds of premade graphics, fonts,
and clipart images to the program.
Hot.
Dog.
Broderbund also sold packs of paper under the Print Shop branding, containing colorful
and decorated stationery intended to compliment the types of designs you could create using
the software, spicing up your dot matrix printouts
in ways that blank white paper couldn’t provide.
The creatively-titled New Print Shop arrived in 1988, updating the software by adding higher
resolution graphics, the ability to add multiple graphics and fonts to a project,
print previewing, color printing and more.
And finally, at least for this video, there was The Print Shop Deluxe launched in 1992
for Macintosh and DOS computers.
This one’s still got the original receipt from when it was purchased at a local Office
Depot, along with my own receipt from when I found this secondhand at a thrift store
around a decade ago, located just twenty minutes south of where it was originally purchased.
Neat.
And this completely overhauled and upgraded version of Print Shop was my introduction
to the franchise.
When I was maybe 6 or 7 years old my Uncle Mark bright over a dazzling sign he printed
on this new piece of software he’d bought called Print Shop Deluxe.
It was a pleasant tropical scene with palm trees, blue skies, and open ocean.
And it was in COLOR.
I was so impressed that I remember having that printout hung on my bedroom wall for
years, where I’d stare at it and imagine myself being on that beach.
Or taking a boat and wandering off onto the open ocean, going over the horizon there and
seeing what lay beyond the confines of that sheet of paper.
Then when we finally ended up getting our own copy of Print Shop Deluxe, the 2.0 version
for Windows 3.1, I immediately went back to that island scene
and began making my own version.
Which allows me to introduce my old friend, Cool Crab!
What a cool crab, isn’t he cool?
So cool!
He’s got sunglasses and a can of soda. And he’s Cool Crab!
[chuckles] Really all of these included square graphics, borders,
and backgrounds feel like old friends, it’s weird.
And anytime I happen to see any of those stock images used in the modern day by random businesses,
it stands out in a huge way.
Like I’m seeing a ghost materialize in front of my eyes or something.
But yeah, back in the 90s, even with a black and white printer
Print Shop Deluxe was the good stuff.
Seeing the way my printer interpreted the imagery and dithered things down was fascinating,
and playing around with the settings was fun since you’d get wildly different results.
[dot matrix printer prints a matrix of dots]
Sometimes the results were pretty legible, for black and white at least.
Other times, it’d turn into a muddy mess of dark gray splotches,
especially with images optimized for color.
So it was awesome that with a single click you could also turn any composition into a
coloring book page, making for a cleaner printout, and also a roundabout way to get color
Print Shop creations from a monochrome printer since you could color them in yourself.
And nowadays, I have the privilege of using hardware I could only dream of back then,
like full color dot matrix and inkjet printers, ooh.
Who knew adulthood would be so rad, I would’ve wanted to grow up a lot sooner
if I knew I’d own multiple color printers.
[chuckle] And of course, creating things like greeting cards and banners in Print Shop
is always a bit of a thing due to the extra steps involved.
Like with greeting cards, they have to be folded up after printing, something I was
all too happy to do as a kid in order to practice my paper airplane skills where I always tried
making the crispiest folds.
And with banners, you had to print out multiple sheets of paper, trim them down,
and paste ‘em together.
Or you could use continuous tractor feed paper if your printer supported it, dotting pages
continuously with ink across multiple sheets as long as you liked.
And of course, you had those ultra satisfying perforated end pieces
that needed tearing off afterward.
[paper tearing with satisfaction]
Pure bliss right there, that’s how you know work was getting done!
I don’t even know how many school things and church events and workplace happenings
were announced via Print Shop creations, but I remember seeing those graphics and fonts
absolutely everywhere in the nineties.
And it always made me wanna go back home and create my own banners, my own posters, my
own monthly calendars I’ll never actually use,
but dang it I can make a calendar, how cool is that!
Inevitably, I’d get accused of wasting precious ink ribbons by my folks.
And rightly so, that stuff wasn’t cheap!
But still, I’m grateful they allowed me to play around with the program and the printer
as much as they did, because it was genuinely inspiring stuff.
Thinking back, it really was a kind of childhood escape, a digital destination where I could
ignore the external world for a moment and create my own reality within the confines
of an 8.5x11-inch sheet of dead tree material.
Even with clipart graphics as simple as these and printouts in monochrome,
it didn’t hold me back.
Childhood imagination filled in the gaps, and even now in my mid-thirties it still brings
back a little bit of that creative spark when I sit down at an old PC
with Print Shop Deluxe installed.
I know it’s still around as a product in some form,
which I guess is up to version 23.1 now, jeez.
But for me, that 1990s Windows 3.1 aesthetic is the only version that feels perfectly proper,
running at 640x480 with those chunky buttons and scrollbars,
and all the old graphics and fonts.
[lo-fi synth music to print and relax to]
And if you enjoyed this rambly retrospective, then check out some of my other videos or
stick around for new things that are always in the works here on LGR.
And as always, thank you for watching!