Tales From the Tower Wiki

On this page, we shall have a closer look at the graphics files, including textures and sprites, that can we extract from the installation folder with the help of the XWE Editor. Taradino Cassett has kindly assembled an extractable archive, which you're free to download over at Doomworld.

Some of these textures have been named by the developers in most curious and interesting ways, lending us some valuable, and not seldomly humorous, insight into the creation process and the identity of certain objects and locations.

BRAIN1.Keith's brain.bmp
The texture for the Brains in Sheol, apparently as an impish allusion to Keith Dando, one of the developers of ROTH.

AOCHRIST.anatomy of christ.bmp
The book with the blue binding that we find inside Charles Randall's Vicarage, along with the second volume of Florentine's Journal and a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, is apparently called The Anatomy of Christ.

ARMOR1.knight for alan.bmp
Extracted from the DEMO2.DAS folder, the texture for the Suits of Armor has apparently been named after Alan Coltman, the director of Realms of the Haunting.

EXPER1.experiment.bmp
Extracted from the DEMO1.DAS folder, this texture depicts the experimental set-up of chemical apparatuses, found in the Laboratory in the basement of Charles Randall's Vicarage. The liquid substances inside the test tubes actually have the same colours as the three types of Vials that we can use to replenish our health.

Unused Textures[]

PHONE1.phone_in_study.bmp
Apparently, the developers initially meant to implement one of these, nowadays considered old-fashioned, telephones in the Mansion's Study.

MOSCHALK.chalked_map.bmp
Although I'm fairly sure that this chalked map cannot found in the actual game, I'm curious as to where it was supposed to be implemented. Possibilities include the Mausoleum, the Caverns or the cave system on the Island of Threads that eventually leads us to the Chamber of the Soulstone.

MAPWA1.wall with map.bmp
Here's a similar texture that I came across, showing a wall with a hand-drawn map not unlike the chalked depiction above.

File:HOSLAMP.lamp_in_hospital.bmp
File:HOSFLO1.hospital_floor.bmp
Extracted from the DEMO3.DAS folder. As implied by the titles of these two textures (hospital lamp and hospital floor), at some point in the development process, the player was supposed to explore a hospital, potentially the one we see in the final cut-scene of the game. If my memory does not fail me, the texture for the electrical lamp was infact used in the area preceding Florentine's Observatory, in which attacked by the brown Urge creatures under the flickering light of various defective lamps.

Demo Location - Unused Wall Textures and Goblin Sprites - PC Power 33

Demo location, as seen in issue 33 of PC Power magazine

SPECWA1.wall in special loc.bmp
This wall texture was apparently planned to be used in a "special" location in the Mansion. The depicted agony faintly evokes the Porte de l'Enfer of Auguste Rodin, a monumental sculptural group work which is based on a scene from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.

IMP1.imp in shadow rm.bmp
I don't think I've come across this little imp statue anywhere in the game. An Imp is a mythological creature, similar to a Goblin, often considered mischievous, that originated in Germanic folklore. Apparently, the goblin sprites and the anguished wall textures just above were originally meant for a demo location which has been cut from the finished game.[1]

Gen4 95 ROTH map overlay

Screenshot of in-game map overlay

Map overlay
Although not technically a texture, a screenshot was found in Issue 94 (01/1997) of French magazine Gen4 showing an in-game map overlay. It's only a partial screenshot, but what can be seen is a wireframe/outline of a map in the Halls of Doppelgangis. It's interesting that a feature like this was shown in a magazine within a month of the game's release, despite not being in the game.

BERNI'S NINJA
This is a single sprite found in the texture dump of the beta version of ROTH. The full texture name is NINJA1_BERNI'S NINJA, implying there were likely other frames (hence NINJA1), although they don't seem to have been included in the beta version. In the demo and release versions of the game, this texture is not included at all. Perhaps the throwing stars from the unused weapon textures were supposed to be associated with this presumably scrapped enemy. The file name is probably a reference to Berni Hill, one of the artists involved in the production of Realms of the Haunting.

References[]