[Coco] The Resurrection of Bomb Threat, the game

[Steve Strowbridge]

It has been great being a part of this story as it's unfolded, and I'm glad
to have received the latest Rick Adams game on CoCo cartridge!
Can't wait to see what's next.



Steve Strowbridge, aka
The Original Gamer Stevie Strow
ogStevieStrow at gmail.com

Website:  http://ogsteviestrow.com
Merchandise:  http://8bit256.com
All things CoCo:  http://imacoconut.com
CoCoTALK!  http://cocotalk.live



On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 8:29 PM, Rick Adams <rick at rickadams.org> wrote:

> After my early success selling Temple of ROM to Tandy, I made a second
> attempt at developing an original game for them, which I called Bomb
> Threat.  But after a few nibbles, Tandy decided they weren't interested.  I
> tried to market it to various other companies, to no avail.  But it was a
> treasured part of my kids' childhood to play what they called "The Tractor
> Game."
>
> They called it that because the game involved moving a tractor around a
> warehouse full of merchandise in which some demented madman had scattered
> numerous bombs (terrorism hadn't been invented yet, so there was no need to
> explore that angle).  The goal was to move the crates of merchandise away
> from bombs, or vice-versa if you felt particularly brave.  If there were
> any crates remaining after the last bomb went off, and you hadn't managed
> to get your own fool self blown up, you won points for every remaining
> crate.
>
> I kept the floppies containing the source in a bookshelf in my
> basement...  they languished down there for 30 years... until one day I
> went looking for them and couldn't find them.  Every once in a while I
> would go down there and search once more, but eventually gave up... I
> imagine they got packed away somewhere (imagine the warehouse in which the
> Ark of the Covenant was stored) or perhaps were mistakenly thrown out, and
> after numerous attempts to excavate them, I concluded that they were one
> with the snows of yesteryear.
>
> 33 years later, various friends got me interested in Color Computer
> development again via various emulators on my Windows laptop and, later, on
> a Raspberry Pi running Ron Klein's CocoPI distribution.  Intrigued, I made
> one more epic quest to find the floppies for Bomb Threat, only to give up
> in defeat.  Bomb Threat was no more.
>
> Or was it?  One day my two sons came home all aflutter and ran down to the
> basement and started rummaging in our old VCR tapes. They had been
> reminiscing about "The Tractor Game" and one of them had remembered we had
> a gameplay video of the game from 30 years previous.
>
> And they found it!  I carefully analyzed the video, taking screenshots and
> zooming in for careful analysis, to figure out all the sprites for the
> game.  I started coding, and three weeks later, I had a very rudimentary
> demo of the game to show off at CocoFEST!
>
> My oldest son Joel, a graphic designer by trade, surprised me one day with
> stunning complete packaging artwork for a cartridge and a CD of the game,
> carefully researched to mimic the Tandy look and trade dress of their
> products of the period.
>
> Recently I finished the game, and at the recent Tandy Assembly convention,
> a demo of Bomb Threat was running at my table and a limited run of Bomb
> Threat cartridges was sold.  Since then I've been working on a CD version
> with three versions of the game (with artifact colors, without artifact
> colors, and a version for Dragon computers), and gameplay videos, including
> the original 33 year old gameplay video that my kids found.
>
> Finally, the CD version was completed and is available for online sales at
> http://kunaki.com/Sales.asp?PID=PX00265U3K
>
> It is the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, as I begin
> contemplating what my next project will be.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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>