The BradyGames Witchaven Strategy Guide?

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

That thread with the fake Marathon compilation got me thinking about this again.

 

The Witchaven strategy guide from BradyGames.  I've never been able to find a copy.  Hits for Witchaven guide on places like eBay tend to come up with the "Spellbook and Guide to the Underworld" which is just the game manual under its gimmicky title and not the strategy guide in question.  Book sites sometimes list an ISBN for it (ISBN 10: 1566864127 ISBN 13: 9781566864121) but I've never seen them to have a picture of the cover or an available copy on them any time I've looked, either.  Even with how niche an interest Witchaven is I think there were some other people looking for this book who might've bragged if they got their hands on it.

 

It seems odd that there's so little remaining evidence of this, you could argue that Witchaven was an unpopular game and no one would've cared about a strategy guide for it, but the Corridor 7 strategy guide is available enough that it's both preserved online and I have a copy for my bookshelf, so I don't entirely buy that argument; would there really have been so few copies in circulation that they're all gone or hidden away somewhere?  Or is it possible that the book never actually hit publication?  I'm not entirely sure on all the vagaries of how it works but at least some sources seem to suggest to me that it's possible for an ISBN to be assigned on a book that then doesn't actually come out.  So even beyond finding a copy, does anyone have any shred of evidence beyond the ISBN code that this book existed?  Photos that show it, reviewed or advertised in a magazine somewhere or the like, even anecdotally want to say you had a copy in the past or clearly remember seeing it in the store back in the day, anything?

[Murdoch]

I remember there was a decent marketing push for Corridor 7 back in the day. Full page ads in gaming mags, the works. I think they vastly over-estimated how well the game would be received, and so sales numbers for the guide were almost certainly correspondingly low. Witchaven was published by Intracorp while Corridor 7 was self-published, so the bean counters that be probably looked at the guide sales numbers and went "yeah nah" to a release at some point before the game itself came out.

 

So likely it only ever existed as an idea or at best, a draft document that never saw publication.

[DNSKILL5]

It was at least “published”, but may not have seen widespread release or was flat out unreleased, but fully written, finished, and ready for it. 
 

I wonder if this was written during the development of the game or afterwards. Sometimes that can result in screenshots showing an older version of the game. 

Edited May 27 by DNSKILL5

[Vermil]

EDIT: Please delete me.

Edited May 27 by Vermil

[Kinsie]

7 hours ago, Murdoch said:

Witchaven was published by Intracorp while Corridor 7 was self-published

 

Wikipedia:

Quote

Capstone Software was a subsidiary of IntraCorp, a Miami-based computer and video game company

 

I wanna say that Capstone/IntraCorp's financial issues and failed attempt to go public were starting to really set in around this time, which probably had something to do with it.

[Murdoch]

11 hours ago, Kinsie said:

Wikipedia

 

Also Wikipedia...

 

Quote

Corridor 7: Alien Invasion

Original release date:

March 1, 1994

Release years by system:

1994 – MS-DOS

Notes:

First-person shooter

Self-published by Capstone Software