#bob pepper

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I never thought I would own a working copy of Dark Tower (1981). Now that I do, it kind of terrifies me. The box is gigantic! The tower worked when I bought it, but it is so legendarily fussy, I’m loathe to turn it on again. And, honestly, it looms so singularly in my consciousness that it just intimidates the hell out of me. Safely in the box, all my preconceptions about the game remain intact.

Here are the basics: it’s an electronic game. Each player controls a quarter of the board, their kingdom, and seeks to raise an army to find the three keys that allow them to lay siege to the tower and it’s evil. While they move about the board, much of the action of the game is interacting with the tower, which presents and resolves events, and generally tracks their progress. There’s a digital display, but also a number of back-lit slides featuring Bob Pepper’s art work (which correspond to events). It’s a very impressive, if finicky, bit of tech for 1981.

The game was designed to take advantage of the momentary rise in popularity of the fantasy genre generally and D&D in particular — it was very much for folks who were curious about D&D but didn’t want to be a D&D weirdo and had the money to indulge. Despite investing a staggering amount of money into the game (including on an ad featuring Orson Welles), Milton Bradley kept it on shelves for only a single holiday season because it got entangled in a lawsuit claiming the design was stolen (which it seems M-B eventually lost to the tune of $750k in 1985). Having read a bit about it, I’m not convinced that was the right result. Nevertheless, the suit certainly shortened Dark Tower’s longevity. Because of that, the small number of units produced and their relative fragility, working copies are genuinely scarce today.

Part of the problem for me is that the game came out when I was three years old. By the time I became aware of the game, it was an immediate object of interest, but already largely a ruin whenever I encountered it. One kid, whose older brother had the game, used the box as a toy chest for his monsters; the game itself was nowhere to be found. Another friend was sure he had it, but could never find it, or maybe it was busted when he did. I knew a guy in college who had a dusty, broken tower on his dresser. When I crack open the box, I feel like I’m visiting an abandoned place.

So I’ve let Return to Dark Tower fill the void. It’s a good alternative, but admittedly, something is lost in the move to modern razzle-dazzle. Bob Pepper’s art carries so much of the mystique of the original. Like Dragonmaster (but unlike most of his book cover work, oddly), the art here seems archetypal, but for a system that is beyond our knowledge. Similar to the way we can identify religious objects that are Celtic but, because they left no written record, the details of their practice are lost.

I’m loathe to spoil such a rare mystery.