[Coco] The Resurrection of Bomb Threat, the game

[Rick Adams]

John Linville and Neil Blanchard over at The Coco Crew are doing the 
cartridges... I'm sure there will be more but you'll have to ask them 
about how and when.


On 10/19/2017 11:31 PM, Jerry Adams wrote:
> 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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>>
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