be exchanged for new equipment at various shops. The shops are in fixed locations, but their inventories can change. The main palace contains one long, horizontally scrolling room with the sacred flame and the entrances to 7 bell towers. At the top of each tower is a boss. The game's objective is to defeat the boss in each tower, collect the bell from each and destroy the bell collected (which destroys the tower as well) in the sacred flame in order to open the way to fight the final battle with Rubas. To reach the main palace from the start of the game, the player must traverse an area containing 10 hidden dungeons. The first dungeon maze has 167 screens, and the tenth has 235. The entrances to the labyrinths are invisible and a specific room must be found to exit each dungeon. The dungeons also contain shops where items can be purchased. Hidden throughout the towers are invisible portals to a secret areas called the Parallel Zones which resemble the towers, but are an alternate version, as well as Secret Rooms, in both of which the player can find equipment superior to that available in the shops. Development Deadly Towers was the work of Japanese video game developers Lenar and Tamtex, the latter being owned by the same company as Irem. Lenar is credited both in the title screen and the end of the game, while Tamtex is mentioned only in the ending credits. The development team consisted of staff from both companies. On Lenar's side, the game was co-designed by a former employee from Namco (Junichi Mizutari), where he worked on the similar The Tower of Druaga. Broderbund's relationship with Lenar was facilitated by Scott (Kenji) Tsumura, who worked for Irem and eventually worked for Broderbund to form the Kyodai Software division (and also later co-founded NST). Alan Weiss, the Nintendo Producer at Broderbund, managed all product development and worked with Lenar to translate the text of the game. Weiss kept the name, Prince Myer, to try to make faithful conversions and not "Americanize" it. The name, "Deadly Towers", came from Ed Bernstein of Broderbund. In response to the difficulty level of the game, Weiss stated: "We did a lot of testing of the game and we didn't actually find it that difficult at Broderbund, and I think we wanted something more challenging than previously published titles to