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AD&D Tower of Mystery
Name:
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AD&D Tower of Mystery |
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Company: |
Mattel |
Model #:
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7175 |
Programmers:
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Jane Terjung and Mike Sanders (Program)
& Jane Terjung (Graphics) |
Year: |
1984 |
Released?
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No
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Notes:
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Displayed for the
first time at CGE 99 |
"Stuck on top of the Tower of Mystery, you must preserve your
strength and protect the treasure as you attempt to escape."
While it's short on details, this 1983 catalog description
gives us the run down on Tower of Mystery's basic plot.
If your not a serious Intellivision collector,
then you might not know about a little D&D game that was
released by INTV called Tower of Doom. Tower of Doom was
part of INTV's attempt to revive the dead Intellivision in the
late 80's much like Atari did with the 2600. While most
people thought that Tower of Doom was an original game by INTV,
what they didn't know was that they really just finished up an
old D&D game called Tower of Mystery, which Mattel had been
working on back when they closed their doors in 84.
As you may have guessed by now, the 2600 version of Tower of
Mystery is based on the original Intellivision version that became
Tower of Doom. However back when the 2600 port was being
developed, the Intellivision version's gameplay was still being
defined. So it's unknown how close to Tower of Doom the
finished version of ToM would be. However according to the
Blue Sky Rangers, both versions shared a number of features
including a map view for exploration, close-ups for battles, a
scrolling line of text that imparted information and commentary
from on-screen characters. These features alone make this
one impressive 2600 game.
Tower of Mystery was so complex in fact that it
needed a 16K board with 2K of onboard RAM (something almost
unheard of at the time). Of course even with this extra
memory the 2600 version had to be watered down slightly, and as a
result the game only contained eight different rooms but this was
still quite an accomplishment on the 2600. Tower of Mystery
also allowed the player to enter their name, a first for any 2600
game.
Tower of Mystery is an action oriented Dungeons
& Dragons game (unlike Treasure of Tarmin which is a pure
adventure game) in which the player must successfully make his way
to the bottom of the tower and escape. The game style is
very similar to Gateway to Apshai by EPYX, in which the character
must move around a screen slicing at a monster with his sword
instead of merely pressing the attack button when a monster faces
him. Of course it wouldn't be a D&D game without items
and gold to pick up now would it? So scattered through the
dungeons there are various keys, potions, scrolls, and treasure
just waiting to be discovered by the player. Tower of
Mystery was starting to sound like every D&D players dream.
So what happened? About a month before the
game was completed, Mattel Electronics closed their doors and all
game development was stopped. What happened to the original
code after that is anybodies guess, but somewhere down the line it
was lost, and only a small demo that was shown at the 1984 CES
show remains. It's a shame that such a great game was lost,
but there's always hope that someone out there may have the
original source code sitting on a EPROM or disk tucked away in a
box. Unfortunately, due to copyrights (TSR is now owned by
Wizards of the Coast), the rom for Tower of Mystery cannot be
released to the public. This may change in the future (such
as was the case with Garfield), but until then these few grainy
screenshots will have to suffice.
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to 2600 Software
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