[Coco] The Resurrection of Bomb Threat, the game

[Christopher R. Hawks]

On Thu, 19 Oct 2017 19:29:18 -0500
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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

    Saw the 'demo' at CoCoFest! 

Ordered.

Hippo Birdie to me!!!

Christopher R. Hawks
HAWKSoft
-- 
  "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a
minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it's longer
than any hour. That's relativity."   --Albert Einstein
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