War of the Worlds Conversion Kit

Cinematronics

I recently came across a box tucked way in the back of a distributor's stash. It was opened, and the monitor glass was first to catch my eye. I kinda figured out what it was, and began hunting through the box. <brag mode on> Turns out I had found a complete NOS War of the Worlds conversion kit for Star Castle or Armor Attack (less the sideart which was noted in the attached letter). Included was:

1 WotW marquee with paper still on it

1 WotW unapplied CPO

1 Wooden control panel 'blank'

1 WotW monitor overlay 'gel'

1 WotW monitor bezel with the protective plastic still attached

1 WotW sound card (converted Star Castle)

1 WotW CPU board (factory modified)

As noted in the attached documents, this was a 'revised' War of the Worlds kit which did not include any sideart. Apparently Cinematronics ran out of art, but had enough pieces left for everything else in the kit.

The strange thing about the CPU board is that the ROMs are labeled 'Color WOW'. I know War of the Worlds was written as a color game, and there were a couple of later prototypes that used the same color conversion board as Boxing Bugs. However, I thought it odd Cinematronics would distribute ROMs marked as color when they were to be used in a B&W game. Running these color ROMs on a black & white game causes all the vectors to be drawn as "bright" vectors. Which is unfortunate. It would be cool to find a set of B&W ROMs that used both levels of vectors. It seems unlikely such a set exists since the game was apparently written in color, and because of its vast under-whelming popularity, there was no motivation to go back and redo all the vectors as dual intensity B&W vectors.

The kit was all packaged in a secondhand shipping box (meaning Cinematronics used a secondhand box to ship the kit) with the packaging list/letters from Progressive Game Distributors still attached. These documents are probably the closest thing there was to a War of the Worlds manual. I suspect Progressive was owned by Cinematronics as some sort of tax and accounting arrangement.

Oh, both the game PCB and sound board were wrapped in newspaper. Newspaper from San Diego dated April 14, 1983... Unfortunately, I could find no mention of the kit price. The box had been sitting in a warehouse for almost 20 years, opened, but unused. The packaging material was shredded tractor-fed computer printouts. Hmm, a few hours, a little glue and possibly some unreleased source code!