Impossible Mission

Amiga 1200, Impossible Mission (1993/1984) game

Your starting position is the top left of the map in the underground lair of your foe: Elvin Atombender. His plan, to trigger the launch codes for the world's nuclear missiles that will destroy the planet. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to search every room in search of puzzle pieces hidden in furniture that when combined will unlock Elvin's Main Control Room and prevent his evil plan. But it's not as simple as that: Elvin has programmed numerous robots to guard his complex, two different types being those that trundle along the floor and large black balls, floating orbs that can travel anywhere within a room. On your side you have acrobatic skill (you can jump), an indefatigable energy and the assistance of Snooze codes and Lift Resets which send robots to sleep for a short period or reset the position of the lifts in a room. Yep, it's a simple platform game, but it's also original and inventive. The name? Not so much, it's a clear ripoff of 'Mission: Impossible,' but back in the wild west gaming of the 80s such things weren't so strange.

This game was a real surprise to me. For one thing I hadn't planned on playing it particularly soon, but when I recently came to use my Amiga 1500 for the first time this year and began playing 'Fire and Ice,' about five minutes in, sound and vision cut out and the disk drive went dead, and though the fan was still whirring there seemed nothing I could do to sort it out. I was geared up for playing an Amiga game, in fact I've had a pile of game boxes in my room since last year, selected from the garden shed's store of plastic tote boxes full of them, so I wasn't to be defeated so easily. Still wanting to play something for the Amiga I picked out 'Impossible Mission' to try on my 1200 and was pleased to discover it worked... But this really is a trip back in time, the game originally released in the 80s, myself playing it in the early 90s when we first got our Commodore 64/128. I was never able to get very far in those days being quite young (I seem to remember my Father completing it and calling me over to see the ending - "NO! NO! NOOO!" See attached video), but the patience needed to get through so many rooms when most games on the system were short plays for me, mainly because they were so tough I couldn't survive more than a few minutes before I'd be sent back to the beginning again, was too much to ask. My claim to glory is that I did complete two games on that system ('Yogi Bear' and 'Ninja Massacre'), but that was a few years later.

Dedicating potentially six hours to a game in those days would have been an impossible mission in itself. That's one of the innovative aspects of this title: rather than having an energy bar or lives, the traditional form of regulating progress and extending a game's lifespan, time is your life gauge. You have six hours, since you begin at 12:00 and have until the timer reaches 6:00 to complete the mission. The catch is that every time you die, be that falling through a hole at the bottom of a room (oddly, you can fall any number of floors within a room without penalty), touching one of the robots or being caught in their Force Lightning electrical blasts, you lose ten minutes of real time. What a great idea! This then adds a tactical dimension to proceedings that I hadn't expected and engaged me more than I'd have expected of an ancient 2D platformer - should you go through each room cautiously, paying attention to the varied patterns of movement of the robots to plan your route to each piece of furniture you need to search, or dash madly along acting on instinct alone? A bit of both, I found, since running and leaping about keeps you in that state of stimulation that means you're more likely to react quickly to whatever you encounter. But I definitely erred more on the side of caution when I finally did beat the game. I played it a number of times before I was successful because you do feel a sense of urgency with a timer on your movements and are more likely to be reckless, especially if you've had a few silly deaths early on.

For my winning run I was fortunate in the layout of the rooms, which, in another innovation, are randomly distributed across the map. I began with both Code Rooms as my initial two locations - these are game rooms in which you play a simple memory test on a large checkerboard screen where several squares light up and play a note which must be selected in ascending order to win either a Snooze or Lift Init code. They begin with only three notes and add one to the random pattern each time you succeed. This is another way to increase the tension as you can stand there and play the game to increase your codes which will then make rooms easier, but how long do you commit, especially as it gets harder to select the right notes quickly? I think I got up to about six or seven squares before I felt enough time had been spent and that set me up nicely for the mission. I suppose ideally they'd come somewhere in the middle of the stronghold as you can find these codes within furniture, too, so the game rooms aren't the only source, and suddenly having codes to make life easier later would be a good morale booster. But I'd played the game enough times to know there were only a few rooms that really required these codes, as with patience and care you could search most rooms without too much incident since the patterns of the robots and layouts never change, so it's just a case of learning them.

On this occasion the most difficult rooms came later so there was less pressure on me since I knew I'd collected most of the puzzle pieces and could afford a few deaths or to take it slow, and as it turned out, I succeeded on the hardest rooms without any trouble anyway. Just as important, the entrance to the Main Control Room was also in one of the last lift columns so I didn't have lengthy backtracking or risk-taking to traverse already completed rooms in order to reach the goal (that was another side of it - you didn't have to search every piece of furniture in a room, you could always come back later, but I preferred to completely clear a room rather than try to remember where I'd left anything behind). Everything fell into place for me and I had plenty of time in which to complete the final part of the game: solving the puzzles. With four parts to each puzzle and nine puzzles in the game I felt this was actually more likely to be a challenge than the action, although I'd also got the impression it didn't really matter which four bits went together as long as they were the same colour. That did seem to be the case and may have been a fault, I'm not sure, but I at least tried to put the correct pieces together as much as possible. I used the Pocket Computer to orient each two pieces in view at the time correctly (two minutes are lost each time you request the computer's help), so I only had to change the colour and put them together, but even then it took a while to get the right pieces together. I managed to get a few complete blocks with the little holes, old-fashioned computer punch cards, but by the end I was flinging together any remaining ones just to get finished.

And then it was all over, the puzzles spell 'ASPARAGUS' (I have a feeling there was some backstory in the original C64 manual about Elvin hating his vegetables or something along those lines [goes away to check manual] - no, actually it doesn't, but I recommend reading the manual, it's good fun). You enter the Control Room, get an image of a horrified Elvin beaten, as you can see in the video, and you get a score. Like most games of that era, the high score is the important thing to encourage replaying, though scores for scores' sake were never much of an incentive then, and still aren't. I was pleased with my score of 19,856, even so, and it is tempting to go back into the game again. What I like about it is the beauty of its simplicity, the clean lines, the good design of the layout, whether that be the rooms themselves with their nicely crafted furniture, the cute robots and their not so cute electrical discharges, and the sound effects - there's no music, but to have digitised speech at home in 1984... well, we were impressed in the late-90s when the N64 began to feature speech in games like 'TWINE' or 'Perfect Dark' (2000 actually, but there were other games before that, like 'Rogue Squadron' or 'Turok 2'), or Amiga games earlier ("It's such a shame he's dead." "At least he tried hard"), so I can only imagine the wow factor of hearing it in 1990 or so when I first encountered it! Indeed, the yell as you fall to your doom, and Elvin's opening statement ("Another visitor. Stay awhile. Stay Forever!"), has gone down in our family as one of those things we can always reference!

I was impressed by the animation, particularly of Special Agent 4125, the character you play - rotoscoped animation wouldn't have been used in games that far back, I'm pretty sure, with later titles 'Prince of Persia' and 'Flashback' really bringing their characters to life in impressive fashion. But I felt the animation was very good, and the hollow footsteps provide a precision of sound to it that makes you feel like you're having real interaction with the environment. That extends to the whirring of the lifts as you travel up and down in very pleasing fashion, and even the way you could log onto a computer terminal. Now it's nothing special to be able to pull up a menu on screen at will, but in those days to be able to enter a computer screen was another level of immersion. It's as simple as selecting options to either put the robots to sleep, reset the lifts, or exit the terminal, but it's one more way you're pulled into this world even more. The other notable thing is the colourful style, each lift shaft a different colour so you have a better idea where you are, not every area the same generic colour, and the rooms have different backdrops - it all adds to the game environment to make it a pleasure to play. In fact I was close to giving it classic status with four stars, except there isn't really enough to keep going back to once you've beaten it unless you're intent on high scoring.

This particular copy of the game was bundled in with 'Impossible Mission 2025: The Special Edition' - I never even gave the date a thought at first, then I almost considered playing it next year in the year it's set, except I don't have fond memories of that one and I'm into this type of game right now so I'll be going straight onto that next. It's funny the original should so overshadow the remake, which I recall as being dull in both gameplay and visuals, all brown and grey as the 90s loved, thinking dark colour meant a more serious game. I shouldn't judge it yet as I haven't played it, but I had much less interest in revisiting the 2025 version than the original. I actually remember the game being bought in what would have been the late-90s when we first had our Amigas, and Electronics Boutique (before it became GAME), was still selling a small selection of Amiga titles. I remember by Father buying it and, as I say, being underwhelmed by the main 2025 game, which probably didn't endear me to the original either since they were both of the same ilk and by then I'd played many more impressive and advanced titles and genres on Game Boy and Amiga so I doubt I really appreciated 'Impossible Mission' at the time. That only makes it more special to rediscover it now and accomplish yet another completion I wasn't able to when I was younger. Attractive in its simplicity, a touch of tension, and a lovely design to it all mean this remains a good prospect (and I haven't even mentioned the revolutionary idea of having a Pocket Computer, or the fact you had a User Interface, and the simple, but useful map, or... "Destroy, my robots!").

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