Chessmaster

Chessmaster is a series of chess-playing computer games. It is made by Ubisoft. It is the best-selling chess franchise in history, with more than five million games sold as of 2002^[update]. The first version of the game, Chessmaster 2000, was released in 1986. This first version and the next one, Chessmaster 2100, were produced by the now-defunct Software Toolworks company.

The Chessmaster chess engine is called "The King". It is written by Johan de Koning from the Netherlands. It was introduced in Chessmaster 4000. Earlier releases had a chess engine written by David Kittinger. One version of the game, Chessmaster 9000, defeated Larry Christiansen, a well-known American chess grandmaster and former multiple U.S. champion.

Timeline

• 1986-88: The Chessmaster series started with Chessmaster 2000 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 on a 3.5 disk in February 1988.
• 1988: Chessmaster 2100 was published for the Apple IIGS.
• 1989: Chessmaster 2100 was published for DOS.
• 1990: The Chessmaster was published for the NES.
• 1991: The Chessmaster was published for the SNES.
• 1991: Chessmaster 3000 was published for DOS, Windows 3.x.
• 1993: Chessmaster 4000 Turbo was published for Windows 3.x.
• 1995: Chessmaster 4000 was published for Windows 95.
• 1995: Chessmaster 3D for PlayStation had the Chessmaster 4000 engine.
• 1996: Chessmaster 5000 was published for Windows 95.
• 1997: Chessmaster 5500 was published for Windows 95.
• 1998: Chessmaster 6000 was published for Windows 95 and Windows 98.
• 1999: Chessmaster 7000 was published for Windows 98 and Chessmaster II was published for PlayStation.
• 2000: Chessmaster 8000 was published for Windows 98.
• 2002: Chessmaster 9000 was published for Windows 98/ME/XP
• 2004: Chessmaster 10th Edition was published for Windows XP.
• 2007: The current version, Chessmaster XI, was released for PC (titled Chessmaster: Grandmaster Edition) and Nintendo DS (titled Chessmaster: The Art of Learning) on 30 October.

References

Other websites

• Chessmaster XI website
• Chessmaster 9000 Archived 2012-05-04 at the Wayback Machine at Feral Interactive