There were always more tasks on my to-do list, but over time my energies were needed elsewhere, including for college, and my interests were moving to my shiny new Amiga 1000. I stopped working on GemQuest in the fall of 1985, and it never shipped, and only a handful of people ever played it. Eventually my TRS-80s were retired, but I kept the diskettes that had the GemQuest source code.
In the 1990’s I had a PC clone with a 5 ¼” disk drive, and I found a DOS utility that could read TRS-80 diskettes and create .DSK files, so I dumped the diskettes to files that I kept for safekeeping. A couple of times I tried to play GemQuest in some TRS-80 emulators, and it mostly worked but there were strange bugs and quirks that I didn’t remember from the game on actual hardware. I remember one time an Air Elemental crossed the screen from left to right, passing clean through walls!
Recently, I had some spare time and my interest returned. I found a newer emulator I hadn’t tried before, trs80gp, and GemQuest seemed to work perfectly. I played through and beat the game on Novice level, with no bugs or issues seen. I decided to devote the time needed to create a User’s Guide, write about the history of the GemQuest, and finally share the game.