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Tombstone City: 21st Century

1981 video game

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 27, 2025
Entity authorityQ7818721 ↗
Source-derived summary

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.

Editorial summary

“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.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1981—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1981. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Tombstone, City and 21st.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Tombstone City: 21st Century” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Tombstone, City and 21st provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

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.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

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.