Time Bandit is one of the most popular and remembered Coco 1/2 games out, and is loosely based on the arcade game Tutankham, although it gets a LOT more complicated. You are a bandit that travels from a central location (called the Time Gates), in which there are 7 different portals in each of 3 different worlds (Fantasy, Space and Western). You have to travel through the gates, gather treasures, destroy monsters, and find the keys and locks to travel back. Each time you go back to a gate you have been to before, the map changes somewhat. You can go into a specific gate up to 16 times... and, in sets of 4 entries per gate, the number of locks and keys you must get increases. If you manage to 'solve' a gate all 16 times, you are given a unique 'Secret Message' for that gate, and the gate shuts down on the main Timegates screen. I have never gotten all the messages in a single game (I have had up to 7), so I have no idea what happens if you manage to solve all 21 gates. This game crammed over 320 screens worth of sideways scrolling play into 32K of RAM - very impressive, especially considering the size of today's games.
Later, the game was ported to the Amiga and Atari ST, and expanded on even further at this point, becoming more like Gauntlet (although those features were developed before Gauntlet itself was released).
Title: Time Bandit
Author: Bill Dunlevy and Harry Lafnear
Publisher: Computer Shack/Michtron
Released: 1983
Requires: Color Computer 1,2,3, 32K RAM, cassette or disk, joystick optional.