Temple of ROM

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 and adding a few more challenging monsters.