The Black Sanctum was one of the first 4 in Mark Data Products series of animated graphical adventure games, and one of two that was an update to an earlier, text-only version (the other being Calixto Island. This series had one big advantage over Datasoft's earlier Animated Adventure series, in that they were compact enough to run off of tape instead of disk, thus widening it's potential audience. It was also ported the IBM PC in CGA mode, but didn't sell as well on that platform. The Mark Data animated graphical adventure series were similar in concept to the Datasoft Animated Adventure Series (starting with Sands of Egypt), but had the distinct advantage of being small enough to distribute on tape (which also widened it's audience). The Black Sanctum was originally a text adventure game by Ron Krebs released in August, 1981, and, upon seeing the first graphical adventure done by Bob and Stephen (Shenanigans), Ron requested that Bob and Stephen redo both of his earlier text games in the graphical format. In this game, one has to rid a hidden monastery of an evil that has taken it over. It should be noted that this downloadable version was modified by Robert Gault to allow save games to disk, instead of the original cassette only.
Title: The Black Sanctum
Authors: Stephen O'Dea, Bob Withers (based on original text adventure version by Ron Krebs, released Aug. 8, 1981)
Publisher: Mark Data Products
Released: End of 1983 or beginning of 1984
Requires: Color Computer 1,2,3, 32K RAM, tape or disk.