The death screens of Conan

a reddit user recently wondered about the “Game Over” screens in the classic Apple II action-platformer Conan: Hall of Volta. The question piqued the curiosity of AppleWin developer, Nox Archaist programmer, and accomplished game developer Michael Pohoreski, who dove into the game’s source code to extract a comprehensive gallery of all the game’s death scenes.

Pohoreski published the results in GitHub and shared the results on reddit. Here are all twenty-eight screenshots — four death scenes for each of the game’s seven playable levels:

Like many Apple II users, I grew up playing this 1984 game from Datasoft. At my hands, Conan died more often than he lived — but I’d blocked the memory that there were this many unique ways to be informed of my failure. Thanks to Pohoreski for the reminder!