Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (video game)

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
Developer(s)	Legend Entertainment
Publisher(s)	Take-Two Interactive
Designer(s)	Josh Mandel
Series	Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
Platform(s)	MS-DOS
Release	April 16, 1997[1]
Genre(s)	Graphic adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is a 1997 graphic adventure game developed by Legend Entertainment and published by Take-Two Interactive. Based on the Callahan's Place book series by author Spider Robinson, the game follows Jake Stonebender, narrator of the books, through six discrete comic science fiction adventures. Taking the role of Jake, the player solves puzzles, converses with characters from the Callahan's Place series and visits locations such as the Amazon rainforest, Transylvania and outer space.

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon began development at Legend in 1995, under the direction of Josh Mandel, co-designer of Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist. Mandel had considered adapting the Callahan's Place books since the 1980s, and saw the project as an answer to the dark and violent content of games in the mid-1990s. Robinson was initially uninterested in the game's development, but increasingly collaborated with Mandel as it progressed. First planned as a self-published title, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon switched to publisher Take-Two late in development, and was subsequently mismarketed as a work of Western fiction.

The game was a commercial failure, although Mandel was pleased with its reception by fans of Robinson's books. It received positive reviews from critics. Callahan's Crosstime Saloon became Mandel's last project at Legend Entertainment, and was the company's penultimate adventure game, followed by John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles (1998).