Son of a bitch. I’d completely forgotten about Dark Tower until I saw this. It came out in 1981, but I don’t know when I got it (I can’t see my parents shelling out $40 for this thing). Maybe in ’82 or ’83, when I had settled into D&D. The TV commercial, starring a decrepit-looking Orson Welles, has become rather famous in the nerd world:
The game of “electronic wizardry” was considered pretty cutting-edge at the time, although I remember it getting pretty boring after only a few plays (probably because I had no one else to play it with). The tower rumbled around in my closet of toys for years, every so often switching on and spitting out those outlandish sound effects.
As I mentioned here, I don’t remember playing the D&D Computer Labyrinth Game (1980), which Dark Tower chased, probably because the price rarely went down on D&D stuff in those days. Even the modules were tremendously expensive. I remember ogling rows and rows of them in the hobby shop.
As for the Ouija Board, let’s be honest, nobody our age who saw The Exorcist (usually after the parental units absolutely forbid it) ever touched the goddamn things. To this day any mention of “Captain Howdy” drives chills through my body.
(Image via WishbookWeb)
2 Warps to Neptune 
I was going to bring up Dark Tower long ago, after I’d found out you were into D&D. A good friend of mine had that in the early ’80s and we played it a couple of times. It was actually a great game!
Woo boy, I have a couple of Ouija board stories that are pretty darn creepy. Those things are no joke. I’m a big paranormal fan (not the movie trilogy, but real paranormal activity), and from what I understand, Ouija boards really are portals for spirits and/or entities to communicate and sometimes manifest themselves on our plane of existence…so they shouldn’t be taken lightly!