Tower of Fear

From developer Charles Forsythe in September 2007:

"The text on the back of the packaging [of the TRS-80 release] was written by Bob Liddell, the proprietor of the Programmer's Guild. He wasn't a programmer, but just published other people's work. He had also published some fantasy role playing (a la "Dungeons and Dragons") gaming manuals that centered on a particular fantasy world and characters he'd created. Tower of Fear was written to fit into that milieu. I believe that Bob saw it as an extension of his fantasy-gaming product line. For my part, I was happy to have a starting point to create a fantasy world -- within the limits of 1980's home computer technology -- for the game.

When I decided to write a game for the CoCo, I decided to recycle the Tower of Fear game and focus more on the programming. It tried to write the game engine so that I could release games for both the Model I/III and the CoCo with relative ease. At the time, however, people were more interested in arcade-style action games for the CoCo, and the market for Model I/III games was waning, so I never took advantage of my multiplatform text adventure engine."