Esprit de Apple Corps comes to Juiced.GS

Esprit de Apple Corp CD 1 label

Back in the mid-1990s, a GEnie user by the name of RUSSELLN12 had a vision: collect all the Apple II games, images, animations, and sounds he could, then make them available in a mass-storage format. The only problem: the mass storage of that era was Zip disks, which held only 100 MB each. Russell Nielson’s collection spanned 24 disks, which he sold at roughly the cost of the media: $15 each, or $360 for the set.

In 2001, Nielson partnered with Ken Gagne, at the time a subscriber to Juiced.GS, to compile those Zip disks into CD-ROM format. The result was Esprit de Apple Corps, a two-disc compilation consisting of 4,500 MOD song files and 10,000 graphic files, as well as games, fonts, sounds, and animations. When Juiced.GS editor-in-chief Max Jones reviewed this multimedia set in Volume 6, Issue 4, he dubbed it “well worth the meager investment” of $25.

Esprit de Apple Corp CD 2 label

At KansasFest 2008, EDAC was discontinued in print and was quietly released as a set of freeware disk images on the personal website of Gagne, who by then was himself editor-in-chief of Juiced.GS.

Finally, these two forces are joined, and Esprit de Apple Corps is now available from the Juiced.GS online store. Still a freeware product, the disc images are available as a free download — but for the first time in 12 years, they’re again available as a pair of CD-ROMs, and again for just the cost of the media and shipping: only $10.

Due to the pandemic, Juiced.GS CD-ROMs are no longer able to be shipped outside the USA — a restriction that affects not only EDAC, but also Opus ][ and Friends For Life. But all these products are also available as downloadable disk images, available globally for immediate use in emulators and for burning to CDs!