Temple of ROM II

A game for the Tandy Color Computer 1, 2 or 3 (requires at least one joystick).

In 1982, Dale Lear and myself were working at Fair, Isaac and Company, a software development company in San Rafael, California. Dale and a few other coworkers convinced me to buy a Tandy Color Computer as my first computer; Dale was soon to sell his first game, Doubleback, to Tandy.

The original Temple of ROM was developed on a modest setup: a very early silver Coco1 with chiclet keys, RCA color TV, EDTASM cartridge, and a cassette tape recorder.

The source code for the game was on three 20 minute cassettes, meaning that each debugging session or program build required a lengthy and insanely convoluted process of swapping tapes and making meticulous backups.

Inspired by the Atari game Adventure and the fantasy novels of Katherine Kurtz, I developed a dungeon exploration game with a large, scrolling maze, populated with monsters and treasures.

Tandy liked my game and agreed to buy it, and happily it sold quite well in stores. Now, 38 years later, I have freshened up the game a bit, expanding the maze by 45% and adding a few more challenging monsters.

Feel free to peruse the source code for this project:

Temple of ROM II project on Github.

You can also build your own levels!

Temple of ROM II online level builder.

I've also included the original Temple of ROM game in all its 1980s glory.