Chessmaster 3-D, The (USA)

Chessmaster (originally The Chessmaster) was a chess-playing video game series, which is owned and developed by Ubisoft. It is the best-selling chess franchise in history, with more than five million units sold as of 2002.^[2]

Timeline

1986: The Chessmaster 2000. First published by Software Country, and soon after by The Software Toolworks. It was published for Amiga, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Macintosh, and DOS. The game had a chess engine (without mouse control) written by David Kittinger and the manufacturer rated the game at 2000 Elo. USCF rated it over 2000; in reality, it is unknown at what strength it plays because the testings were done on slow 1980s computers. In July 1986, CM became the first commercially available software to win the Personal Computer class of the United States Open Computer Chess Championship in Mobile, Alabama.^[3]
1988: The Fidelity Chessmaster 2100 was published for Apple II/Apple IIGS and Commodore 64. In 1989 for DOS and in 1990 for Amiga.
1989: The Chessmaster was published for NES, in 1991 for Game Gear and Game Boy and in 1992 for SNES and Sega Genesis.
1991: The Chessmaster 3000 was published for DOS, Windows 3.x and Macintosh. Moves are now explained with voice output.
1993: The Chessmaster 4000 Turbo, first published by Mindscape for Windows 3.x and Macintosh. Modem and LAN play was available for the first time. A CD-ROM version was released in 1994.
1996: The Chessmaster 3-D for PlayStation (uses the Chessmaster 4000 engine).^[4]^[5]
1996: Chessmaster 5000 for Windows 95.
1997: Chessmaster 5500 for Windows 95.
1998: Chessmaster 6000 for Windows 95/Windows 98 and Macintosh.
1999: Chessmaster II was published for PlayStation.^[6]
1999: Chessmaster 7000 was published for Windows 98
1999: Chessmaster for Game Boy Color^[7]^[8]
2000: Chessmaster 8000 was published for Windows 98. In addition to the English version, a Russian translation was created.
2002: Chessmaster 9000, first published by Ubisoft for Windows 98/ME/XP and in 2004 for Mac OS X.^[1] Compared to the previous title, a French translation was added.
2002: Chessmaster for Game Boy Advance^[9]
2002: Chessmaster for Palm OS.^[10]^[11]
2003: Chessmaster for PlayStation 2.^[12]
2004: Chessmaster, the mobile Java version was published. In 2007 released also for Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.
2004: Chessmaster 10th Edition was published for Windows XP and Xbox. The Xbox version is titled Chessmaster.
2005: Chessmaster Challenge, a simplified version of the game was published for Windows as a downloadable game by PlayFirst.^[13]^[14]
2007: Chessmaster: The Art of Learning for Windows XP/Vista, Nintendo DS, and PlayStation Portable. Windows version is known as Chessmaster: The Art of Learning – Grandmaster Edition. It includes numerous tutorials by International Master Joshua Waitzkin and Grandmaster Larry Christiansen for players of all skill levels, 900 most important chess games in history, 190 personalities of opponents, children puzzles with Raving Rabbids and other minigames.^[15] A Polish translation has been added.
2008: Chessmaster Live for Xbox 360.^[16]

Chess engine

The Chessmaster chess engine is called The King, written by Johan de Köning of the Netherlands. It was introduced in Chessmaster 4000; the first edition featured a chess engine written by David Kittinger, who went on to develop the engines for Interplay‘s USCF Chess, WChess for the German company Millennium 2000, and Sierra Entertainment‘s Power Chess, Majestic Chess and Disney’s Aladdin Chess Adventures. The second edition had an engine designed by Kate and Dan Spracklen of Sargon fame.

According to the September 2009 Swedish Chess Computer Association (SSDF) rating list, Chessmaster 9000 had an estimated Elo rating of 2718 on an Athlon-1200 PC.^[17] If multiple versions of other engines are stripped out of this list, Chessmaster 9000 ranked 14th among all engines tested. As of May 2008, Chessmaster 9000 remained the most recent version rated by the SSDF.