[Coco] The Resurrection of Bomb Threat, the game

[Jerry Adams]

Ordered! Are there going to be any more cartridges for those who can't make
it out to a convention?

Jerry

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 9:30 PM, Christopher R. Hawks <chawks at dls.net>
wrote:

> 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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