Rick Dyer was one of the many fans of the interactive fiction game "Adventure", and wanted to develop his own game, Shadoan, which was an expansive fantasy game inspired by "The Lord of the Rings". He envisioned a game that would feature illustrations of every scene, and developed a prototype called "Secrets of the Lost Woods" (a small section of his larger Shadoan game) that used a roll of printing calculator tape that could be wound forward and backward via microprocessor to show illustrations and information drawn on its surface. Later this was refined to use a filmstrip projector that was synchronized to a tape recording of a narrator reading the text normally shown by the game as the player entered each scene. With the advent of the videodisc player, Dyer realized he could consolidate the audio and visual content onto one medium, and created a device called "The Fantasy Machine". Presentations of this device to prospective toy manufacturers failed.