Atari 7800

Tower Toppler

Trivia

Nebulus/Tower Toppler was also ported to the Atari XE Game System, but never released. Copies of the cartridge surfaced in the late 90s, and it turned out that the XE version ran in black and white, except for on poor display systems, where the black and white patterns turned into colours due to cross-talk on low-bandwidth colour signals. This is only true for PAL systems; on any NTSC system the game would run in full color, it looks pretty close to the 7800 version. Since the prototype uses the "Tower Toppler" name this probably was intended for US release, so the developers would be expecting the game to display in color and not black and white.

John Romero actually did the Apple //e port of Tower Toppler but Epyx canceled the port along with all their other game ports when they were strapped for cash because they were pouring all their money into Atari Lynx launch title development.

The Apple IIe version was in 16-color double-res and used page-flipping. John showed it off at the 1989 AppleFest in Kansas City.

Contributed by John Romero (1019) on Jun 02, 2005.

A remake of this game has been written to work on modern Hardware/OS. It is freely available from http://toppler.sourceforge.net/

For some reason, the title screen is in 16 colors only in the EGA version. The Tandy/PCjr version uses the 4 color CGA title screen, however all other screens (including the game itself) are in 16 colors.