Kabeljauw — The Lost Dutch MSX Fishing Game from 1988

In the spring of 1988, a small software company called Haringsoft based in Delft, the Netherlands, released a game called Kabeljauw for the MSX2 home computer. The game put you in the role of a North Sea fisherman navigating your trawler through increasingly difficult weather conditions while trying to meet your daily catch quota.

The Game

Kabeljauw was a surprisingly deep simulation for its time. Players had to manage fuel, monitor weather forecasts (displayed as a scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen), and choose between different fishing grounds — each with different risk/reward profiles. The Dogger Bank area offered the most fish but also the roughest seas, while the calmer waters near the Dutch coast yielded smaller catches.

The game featured a day/night cycle that affected visibility and fish behavior. At night, the screen shifted to a dark blue palette with only your boat’s lights illuminating the immediate area. Storms were represented by increasingly erratic wave patterns and a distinctive crackling sound effect that players who owned the game still remember vividly.

What made Kabeljauw unique was its economic layer. After each trip, you’d return to port and sell your catch at the fish auction in Scheveningen. Prices fluctuated based on a simple supply-and-demand model — if you caught too much of one species, the price would drop. The goal was to earn enough guilders to upgrade your boat and eventually buy a second vessel, turning your operation into a small fleet.

The Developer

Haringsoft was a two-person operation run by Pieter-Jan Borst and his university friend Willem de Groot, both students at TU Delft at the time. Borst handled the programming while De Groot created the pixel art and sound effects. According to a 2019 interview with Borst on the Dutch MSX forum msxinfo.net, the game was inspired by his grandfather, who had been a fisherman in Katwijk.

“We spent the entire summer of 1987 working on it in Willem’s attic,” Borst recalled. “The MSX2 was perfect for the kind of game we wanted to make — it had enough colors to make the sea look convincing, and the sprite system let us animate the waves smoothly.”

The game was completed in early 1988 and duplicated onto cassette tapes at a local electronics shop. Haringsoft sold copies through a handful of computer stores in The Hague and Delft, as well as through mail order advertisements in the Dutch MSX magazine MSX Computer Magazine.

Why It Disappeared

Only about 150 copies of Kabeljauw were ever sold. By 1988, the MSX platform was already declining in the Netherlands, and the game’s niche subject matter — fishing simulation — didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Haringsoft never released another game. Borst went on to work as a software engineer at Philips, while De Groot became a graphic designer.

The game was effectively forgotten until 2016, when a collector in Rotterdam found a boxed copy at a flea market in Vlaardingen. The discovery was posted on several MSX forums and generated a small wave of nostalgia among Dutch retro computing enthusiasts.

As of 2024, only three complete copies of Kabeljauw (with original box and manual) are known to exist. A loose cassette sold on Marktplaats in 2022 for €340 — a remarkable price for a game that originally retailed for ƒ29.95.

Playing It Today

A ROM dump of Kabeljauw was made from the Rotterdam collector’s copy and can be played in MSX emulators like openMSX. The game holds up surprisingly well — the fishing mechanics are genuinely engaging, and the economic simulation adds a layer of strategy that was ahead of its time. The pixel art, particularly the sunset sequences over the North Sea, remains beautiful in that distinctly MSX way.

If you’re interested in Dutch gaming history or MSX preservation, Kabeljauw is a fascinating piece of the puzzle. It represents a moment when the Netherlands had a small but passionate community of bedroom game developers, most of whom never got the recognition they deserved.