Tombstone City: 21st Century
1981 video game

Tombstone City: 21st Century is a single-player multidirectional shooter written by John C. Plaster for TI-99/4A home computer and published by Texas Instruments in 1981.
Gameplay
The player controls a schooner, shooting aliens (called Morgs) and tumbleweeds in order to woo people back to live in an abandoned city somewhere in the Southwestern United States. The score is labeled as "Population". The game ends when all schooners are gone.
The player's schooner starts out in the middle of sixteen blocks. These are used as shelter, as the Morgs cannot enter this area. The player must venture out to shoot either tumbleweeds (100 points each) or, more importantly, the Morgs (150 points each). Tumbleweeds replenish when the last one has been eliminated. Morgs are produced via one of the cacti out in the field. They can only appear from a cactus that touches another cactus.
“Tombstone City: 21st Century” enters the record as 1981 video game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tombstone, City and 21st can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7818721. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tombstone City: 21st Century” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.