Load Impossible Mission on a Commodore 64 and a voice speaks before you have touched the joystick. “Ah, another visitor,” chortles Elvin Atombender, the scientist whose lair you have come to raid. “Stay awhile… Stay forever!” Electronic Games thought the voice so like Boris Karloff’s that it was “well, scary”. Dennis Caswell’s 1984 game for Epyx paired that voice with an agent who ran and somersaulted more smoothly than almost anything else on the machine, and with a puzzle you could not solve by reflexes alone.
Fast facts
- Designer and programmer: Dennis Caswell, for Epyx. The speech was made by Electronic Speech Systems of Berkeley, California.
- Released: 1984, for the Commodore 64.
- UK publishers: CBS Software (Commodore 64, 1985); U.S. Gold (Spectrum and later versions).
- The task: search 32 rooms in six hours of game time for 36 puzzle pieces, which make nine puzzles and a nine-letter password.
- Sequels: Impossible Mission II (1988) and Impossible Mission 2025 (1994).
Stopping Elvin
The story is a Cold War thriller. Elvin Atombender, a hacker who has grown rich breaking into bank computers, is trying to crack the launch codes of the world’s missile systems and start a war that will destroy the planet. Caswell said the game was “inspired” (his quotation marks) by the film WarGames, with the difference that this time a crazed human villain wants to blow up the world.
You play the agent sent into his underground complex. The clock starts at noon and the world ends at six. The 32 rooms are linked by tunnels and lift shafts, and each room is a set of platforms joined by small lifts. Every piece of furniture, from bookcases to computer terminals, can be searched: stand in front of it, push the joystick forward and wait while a bar shrinks. You may find a puzzle piece, a password that puts the room’s robots to sleep for a while, or one that resets its lifts.
The robots all look the same but behave differently. Some patrol a catwalk, some fire an electric charge, some home in on you. Touching one, or falling through a gap in the floor, costs ten minutes. Caswell later explained that the robots’ behaviour was dealt out at random from about 90 patterns at the start of each game, so the same robot in the same place could react to you differently next time. The map changed too: each game built a new arrangement of rooms.
Back in the lift, a pocket computer shows a map of where you have been and a workspace for the puzzle pieces. You flip them, recolour them and fit four together to make one of nine shapes, and each finished shape gives you one letter of the password to Elvin’s control room. You can also phone your agency’s computer for help, at two minutes a call. Caswell said the program built its puzzles from a library of 240 pieces.
The voice and the agent
Caswell had come to Epyx in November 1983, when it took over Starpath, where he had written Atari 2600 games such as Escape from the Mindmaster and Phaser Patrol. He spent ten months on Impossible Mission and did all the programming, graphics and sound himself, except the speech. By his account the finished program used all but about 1.5K of the Commodore 64’s 64K of memory.
The reviews dwelt on the details. COMPUTE!‘s Gazette listed Atombender’s taunts, “a chilling cry if your character plunges to his demise”, the robots’ zaps and the agent’s footsteps in the tunnels, and his “mocking laughter” as the screen broke up when time ran out. Commodore Power Play heard Elvin order “Destroy him, my robots!” and noted that the game had no music at all. The agent’s flip over a robot or a gap was, in Electronic Games’s words, “a full-circle flip that would make Bruce Lee jealous”. The running figure was admired inside Epyx too: the Summer Games team borrowed “Dennis Caswell’s running man” for that game’s opening ceremony.
In Britain
CBS Software published the Commodore 64 version in Britain, at £8.95 on cassette and £11.95 on disk. When the new magazine ZZAP!64 chose a game for its first high-score contest between its reviewers in May 1985, it chose Impossible Mission, and Julian Rignall won. A month later the magazine’s readers voted it their favourite Commodore 64 game, with 25.9% of the vote, well ahead of Boulder Dash in second place.
In July 1985 U.S. Gold took over Epyx’s British distribution, and that November it released a Spectrum version, written by Softstone, at £7.95. It followed the original closely, down to the random layout and the puzzles, but it had no speech. CRASH gave it 76% and called it “a passable conversion”. One reviewer missed “the realistic, fading scream” of a falling agent, “totally absent — not a squeak on the Spectrum”, and all three complained that the agent had to stand exactly on a lift before it would move. Sinclair User was kinder, with four stars out of five, and Your Spectrum’s Phil South was delighted: “US Gold has done the impossible itself”.
Other versions followed. U.S. Gold sold it for the Amstrad CPC and for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. In 1989 it was among the Atari 7800 games already on sale in America, and U.S. Gold released it for the Sega Master System for Christmas 1990.
Sequels and remakes
Impossible Mission II brought Elvin back in 1988, in a complex of towers with guards, mines and trap doors as well as robots. ZZAP!64 gave it a Gold Medal, and when Ahoy! reviewed it that September it could still quote Elvin’s “Stay a while… stay forever!”. Caswell told Commodore Magazine in 1989 that the original “sold very well”, and that he had once finished it in about 45 minutes with 29,000 points.
A third game, Impossible Mission 2025, was on sale for the Amiga and CD32 in 1994. Later accounts say it let you choose between three characters and included the Commodore 64 original, and that System 3 remade the game for the Nintendo DS, PSP and Wii in 2007 and 2008, with a Nintendo Switch version in 2019.
Sources
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette, December 1984, p. 86: Impossible Mission review (the voice, the sound effects, more than 30 rooms and 90 robots, the codes, a new layout each game; Epyx, Sunnyvale; approximately $35 on disk).
- Electronic Games, February 1985, p. 30: Impossible Mission review (“Designed by Dennis Caswell”; “Ah, another visitor… Stay awhile… Stay forever!”; the Boris Karloff voice; 32 rooms; four-piece puzzles and a nine-letter password; the Bruce Lee flip).
- Commodore Power Play, October/November 1985, p. 20: Impossible Mission review (“Destroy him, my robots!”; no music).
- John Jermaine, “All About Epyx”, Commodore Magazine, August 1989, pp. 53 and 69: interview with Dennis Caswell (Starpath, WarGames, ten months’ work, Electronic Speech Systems, memory use, about 90 robot patterns, 240 puzzle pieces, sales, his record score).
- John Jermaine, “Epyx and the Quest for Olympic Gold”, Commodore Magazine, July 1988, p. 96: Summer Games borrowed Caswell’s running man.
- ZZAP!64, issue 1, May 1985, p. 86: the Impossible Mission high-score contest. Issue 2, June 1985: readers’ top 64 chart (Impossible Mission first with 25.9%; CBS, £8.95 cassette, £11.95 disk).
- Your Commodore, March 1985: CBS Software and Epyx’s games in Britain.
- CRASH, issue 22, November 1985, pp. 88–90: Spectrum review (US Gold, £7.95, Author: Softstone; no speech synthesis; Overall 76%).
- Sinclair User, issue 45, December 1985, p. 30: Spectrum review (US Gold, £7.95; four stars).
- Your Spectrum, issue 21, December 1985: Spectrum review by Phil South.
- Acorn User, issue 57: U.S. Gold’s Impossible Mission for the BBC Micro and Electron, £9.95.
- ACE, issue 21, June 1989: Atari 7800 titles available in the United States. ACE, issue 37, October 1990: U.S. Gold’s Master System releases for Christmas 1990.
- Sinclair User, issue 73, April 1988: Impossible Mission II advertisement (the towers, guards, mines and trap doors). ZZAP!64, issue 38, June 1988: Impossible Mission II Gold Medal. Ahoy!, September 1988: Impossible Mission 2 review.
- Amazing Computing, September and October 1994: Impossible Mission 2025 for the Amiga and CD32.
- Wikipedia, “Impossible Mission” (web, secondary): Impossible Mission 2025’s features and System 3’s remakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Mission