🚀 go-pugleaf

In <9311292325.AA05018@apple.com>, apple!GENIE.GEIS.COM!coco-sysop says:
> >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...
>
>Aha!  It's not a magic 'dot' is it?  <g>  And your name hidden somewhere?

Heh heh.  I remember that easter egg in ADVENTURE!  That was cool!  Nope,
no hidden name.  You have to hold the fire button down for something like
45 seconds continuously and then you can pass thru walls.  Of course, the
bat gets you before then... but the bat doesn't show up unless you haven't
been in danger for awhile... (in other words, if you haven't attracted a
monster...)  So find an entrance to a room, hold the fire button down,
and enter the room... the monster in it heads for you... then exit the room...
the monster gives up and goes to its home position... repeat.  :)  Of course,
as soon as you quit mashing on the fire button, you can't walk thru walls
anymore.  And there's nothing interesting hidden outside the maze anyway.

> >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...
>
>How did you get into the CoCo?  And how did you submit it to Radio Shack and
>get it produced?  That amazes me.  I kept putting off learning assembly and

I used a plain old EDTASM cartridge.  I sent Tandy a cassette tape that they
could CLOADM into memory and then EXEC.  When Dale submitted Doubleback,
he went one better... he actually programmed it into a ROM and sent it in!
He mounted it in a Tandy cartridge case.  Which of his game cartridges
did he sacrifice to do this?  Why, Dino Wars, of course!

> >I was always partial to Dale Lear's games, myself... I really liked
> >Doubleback.  Very original concept, later stolen, errr, I mean, emulated
>
>Do you think they had an original idea or perhaps were truly inspired by
>Doubleback?  Also, recall MegaBug - did it come before or after the Apple II
>and other games that where very similar?

Dale felt very strongly that the wave of copycat games at that time was
pretty pathetic... he wanted to write completely ORIGINAL games with new
concepts instead of what he called "Space Invaders Clone # 243."  So he
came out with Doubleback, which was TOTALLY different than anything that
was in existance at that time.  Later, I saw Photon, and it was VERY
similar... I really wonder if they didn't get the concept from Doubleback.
Or, it could have been that they also thought of the idea independantly.
I don't think we'll ever know for sure.

I don't know about Megabug.
--
Rick Adams / Color Central Software / rickadams@ccentral.UUCP