Tower of Fear

Published by
MobyRank MobyScore
TRS-80 CoCo
Not an American user?


Tower of Fear is a text adventure by Charles Forsythe. The goal is to enter the Wizard's Tower of Fear, get the treasures, and escape alive. The Wizards who dwell in Graylock, powerful necromancers, caused terror in the hearts of all. As the years passed, they gradually succumbed to death - but some of the most powerful ones delayed it by hiding themselves in huge towers, beyond the sun, beyond time, surrounding themselves with magic. But eventually, death came for them still. The last of these was Blackheart Firethrower, with an awesome fortress that none could penetrate. Some say his undead spirit still roams in his Tower of Fear.

The game contains a single graphic screen at the beginning (a drawing of the tower) and only exists of text against a blank background for the rest of the game.


Tower of Fear TRS-80 CoCo Intro/credits screen
Tower of Fear TRS-80 CoCo Intro screen - and the only graphics you will see.
Tower of Fear TRS-80 CoCo Game play screen. The top "window" stays put to show where you are and what you see, the bottom half is your interactive command window.

User Reviews

There are no reviews for this game.

The Press Says

There are no rankings for this game.


There are currently no topics for this game.


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."
Contributed to by Sciere (228152) and mocagh (2669)