| Sea Dragon | |
|---|---|
Title screen |
|
| Developer(s) | Wayne Westmoreland & Terry Gilman |
| Publisher(s) | Adventure International |
| Platform(s) | TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, TRS-80 CoCo, MS-DOS, Commodore 64 |
| Release date(s) | 1982 |
| Genre(s) | Side-scroller |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
Sea Dragon is a side-scrolling game on the TRS-80 computer, released in 1982 by Adventure International. It was ported to the Apple II, Atari 400/800, and the TRS-80 Color Computer.
The player controls a submarine that can shoot torpedoes both forwards and upwards. The gameplay involves dodging moving underwater mines and bad guys, and occasionally surfacing for air. The goal is to destroy an underwater reactor reached after navigating through several game levels. The game concept and gameplay are largely a knockoff of the Scramble arcade game.
Sea Dragon was mildly notable on the Apple II because the title page plays the sound of a digitized voice saying "Sea Dragon!" When the user starts the game he or she is told, "Attention Captain. Your ship's computer is now ready. Please wait while I initialize the systems", and during the game will be informed, "Air level critical!" and "Approaching maximum damage!" This speech was a novelty, as the Apple II speaker is usually only able to emit a click. Programmers clicked the speaker rapidly to produce any sound — the typical Apple II game made beep and boop sounds and plenty of clicking sounds. Programming Sea Dragon to play back an audio sample, using only a clicking speaker, was an interesting technical achievement, shared with several other 1982 Apple II games: Dung Beetles, Creepy Corridors, and Plasmania. The Color Computer version is the only other version that features speech; it says "Welcome aboard, Captain!" on the title screen.
The original version was developed by Wayne Westmoreland and Terry Gilman on the TRS-80.