History:
When my kids were young, long before Gameboys were even a thought by Nintendo,
we had an electronic board game called Dark Tower. This game used a Tower in the
center of the game board that players could turn toward them so they could interact
with the game via a keypad. The Tower used a cylinder with pictures on it, that it
would turn to the correct picture and used one of 3 light bulbs to illuminate individual
pictures as needed. It also had a 2 digit LED display and sound effects to give you
the information the player required to play the game. The tower kept track of the
players inventory and handled movement, battles, rewards, dragon attacks and
purchases at the Bazaar.
My kids played this game so much over the years that they wore the tower out several
times. I had to replace the keypad once and rebuild the motor that turned the cylinder
a couple of other times. Until one day the processor finally said enough. Since the
game was only produced for 10 months back in 1981, before legal troubles forced
production to stop, there are very limited supplies of the game in the wild. There was
no EBay back then to get a new one, so our worn out Dark Tower game was packed
up and put away. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away; it would be like throwing out
my kid’s childhood memories. So the years rolled by and the video game era
exploded on the scene and Dark Tower was rarely talked about unless a new RPG
video game would start the kids reminiscing. The kids got older, eventually moved out
and now all are married. Soon thereafter grandchildren started arriving. I would get
amused when we would all get together for a holiday and someone will bring Dark
Tower up. It was after one of these get togethers that I went on EBay to see if I could
acquire another game. Sure enough there they were. For about $150 you could get
someone else’s worn out game with pieces missing, but a full game in good
condition, or so they advertised, was going to cost you about $350. You can even find
like new not punched and still in sealed bag parts games for $750+. So I decided for
that kind of money I could make one myself that would last longer than these poor
worn machines and that is what I did.
