🚀 go-pugleaf

In <9311210729.AA02375@apple.com>, apple!GENIE.GEIS.COM!coco-sysop says:
>Joel, I never saw Temple of ROM but the screen shots reminded me of the
>Atari ADVENTURE cart.  What was it like?

As author of Tandy's "Temple of ROM" gamepak, I can say that it was
HEAVILY influenced by Atari's ADVENTURE cartridge game for their VCS.
Matter of fact, earlier beta copies of it had a little square moving
around as the player, just like that old cart.  I had also been reading
a lot of Katherine Kurtz's "Deryni" series at the time, which gave
me the idea for the "transfer portals" in the game.  The game was
supposed to have a mediaeval theme, but Tandy ignored my written
instructions for the game and substituted their own space theme
in their own instructions, which I always thought was pretty lame.

The game had two-dimensional smooth scrolling in all directions,
and you explored a VERY LARGE and fairly complex maze.  It never
got incorporated in the game, but I had my own name for most of
the rooms... there was the temple, where you started out... up
in the far upper left corner of the maze was the king and queen's
bedrooms... off towards the lower right was the catacombs... and
one very large room, the size of the entire screen, was the
ballroom.  I had some grandiose ideas for the game that I never
actually implemented... like, I was going to have a full scale
game of Space Invaders going on in the ballroom for you to wander
thru...

I put an easter egg in, of course... there is a way to pass through
the walls, not that it does you any good... it's just in there for
fun...

Temple of ROM was my first game that I wrote... I developed it on
a CASSETTE BASED system... no floppies.  The source fit on a set
of three 20-minute cassette tapes... yes, I was a masochist... but
I didn't have the money to buy a floppy drive at the time...

I was always partial to Dale Lear's games, myself... I really liked
Doubleback.  Very original concept, later stolen, errr, I mean,
emulated by Atari's "Photon" arcade game.  I was carpooling with
Dale and his brother Paul in an old milktruck van at the time
Doubleback was conceived... we would talk about ideas for it on the
way to work... at one point we talked about putting in a pair of
chomping false teeth as one of the objects floating around... but
for some reason Dale never did.

--
Rick Adams / Color Central Software / rickadams@ccentral.UUCP