Gibbon Games

Platform games don’t come much better than this!

Released by Epyx in 1984, Impossible Mission was a landmark in platform gaming. I still remember the first time I saw the game. I was simply overwhelmed by every single aspect. The stunning speech synthesis, the fluid animation, perfect footstep sounds, the puzzle elements, the robots – it was all just so far ahead of anything else I’d seen on the C64 – or indeed any computer platform till then. I just couldn’t believe it, and this initial enthusiasm has – quite amazingly – not faded with time.

For me, IM is the perfect game…

One of the things I love about this game is its clean, simple visual design. Notice how much “empty space” there is on screen. Rather than attempt to fill each pixel of the screen with detail, the designers were content to just (as in the screenshot below), “let cyan be cyan”. When designing Akasa, Impossible Mission was thus not surprisingly the game I kept turning back to when looking for colour themes, or when I felt I needed to reminded that sometimes, (as Andrew Wright kept telling me) “less can be more”.

The game stars Agent 4125 as he leaps and somersaults around the underground stronghold of evil-genius extraordinaire, Elvin Atombender. Apparently Elvin went round the bend after a failed hiscore attempt at college. Now he’s hacking his way towards a nuclear armageddon… Hmmm perhaps there’s a moral lurking in here for all of us? The game manual is actually a fun read and very worthwhile for IM fans. You can find the Atari version of the manual here.

In order to defeat Elvin you have to search the furnishings of his stronghold for the password key required to reach his vault-like central computer room. In a diabolical twist, the game designers decided that the password would have to be assembled on your trusty MIA9366B pocket computer. This involved a fairly difficult subgame in which patterns were overlain in a kind of free-form jigsaw style task. The best strategy was to collect all your pieces and only then set about the password assembly, but even then it was never a picnic.

IM gameplay combined free-flowing freedom of movement, elegance in animation, puzzle solving, strategy, quick reflexes and patience. Interestingly the game was entirely non-violent from the player perspective. In the entire game, the only thing that dies is you. Often. Even then, death is dealt with “softly”, through a deduction in the time left to complete the game. No guns and no explosions here. Beautiful!

A complete playthrough by Tayo, who is clearly the god of Impossible Mission. Beware that it does show the end screen so don’t finish the video if you haven’t finished the game!