[Coco] The Resurrection of Bomb Threat, the game

[Rick Adams]

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.