1984 Sierra / Disney

Platforms: Apple 2, Commodore 64 (GTW64 entry)

A short entry for an educational game that was advertised at the CES in Chicago in 1984 from Sierra. Donald Duck’s Bakery we assume would have had you completing educational puzzles to try and complete bakery tasks of some kind – but we know little more than this at this stage.

Although Donald Duck’s Playground was released, this particular game wasn’t. We assume that Al Lowe may have been involved, so hope to learn more from him soon to establish what happened. In the meantime, if you know anything more – please do get in touch.

Tom Roger Skauen made a good suggestion that perhaps Sierra changed their mind and did a different game instead. The game was from the same sort of timeline as Donald Duck’s Playground, and Chuck Benton agreed that the idea was probably dropped to make way for that game instead.

Thanks to Lance Ewing, we had this article flagged up from Commodore Power Play magazine from the 28th June 1984:

“Donald Duck’s Bakery shows Donald Duck getting his first job at Scrooge McDuck’s factory. Donald has only a few responsibilities at first, but he is expected to learn the business and to follow someday in Uncle Scrooge’s successful web-prints. His success will be determined by the bakery’s efficient and profitable operation. Children will help Donald Duck — beginning with simple tasks and progressing to more responsibility — while learning what it takes to do the job well from simple counting skills through all the details of running a bakery, children learn and can demonstrate knowledge of counting objects, taking measurements, setting controls such as timers and clocks, computing sales, making changes, taking inventory, ordering supplies and dealing with customers.”

Lance also feels that its very likely that they replaced this concept with the Donald Duck’s Playground game and that the description above is what they had in mind going into the Summer CES show at the start of June 1984, but not long after changed the concept and story.

With thanks to Karl Kuras for highlighting, Joachim Froholt for info, Tom Roger Skauen for info, Lance Ewing for info and Archive.org and Atari Compendium for the scans.

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