Robot Odyssey starts with a dream. You fall out of bed and land in the sewer of Robotropolis, an underground city of robots, and the only way home is up through five levels of it. You cannot do it alone. Three robots come with you, and to make them useful you have to climb inside them and wire their brains: bumpers to thrusters, sensors through logic gates, signals out through antennae. In 1985 Electronic Games opened its review by asking: “Have you ever wanted to mess about inside a robot, design integrated circuitry or catch up on Boolean logic?”
The Learning Company announced it at the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1984 as Robot Odyssey I, the first of a planned “DigiWorld” series for teenagers. It was the sequel to Rocky’s Boots, which taught logic gates to younger children, and it asked far more of its players.
Fast facts
- Publisher: The Learning Company, 1984.
- Designers: Mike Wallace and Leslie Grimm.
- Title on release: Robot Odyssey I.
- Platforms: Apple II (64K, $49.95); later the IBM PC, the Tandy 1000 and the Tandy Color Computer.
- Age range: 13 and up.
- Structure: three tutorials, an Innovation Lab and the five-level adventure through Robotropolis.
Inside the robots
Each robot is a square machine with four thrusters, one for each direction, and a bumper on each side that sends out a signal when it touches a wall. It also has an eye, a grabber for picking up objects, an antenna for sending and receiving signals from other robots, and a battery. What a robot does depends entirely on how you connect these parts. You take your cursor inside the robot and lay wires between its inputs and outputs, adding AND, OR, XOR and NOT gates, flip-flops and nodes that split a signal in two.
Wires carrying current glow orange and idle wires stay white, so you can watch a circuit work. Electronic Games gave a simple example. To make a robot move up and signal whenever its right side hits a wall, you wire the right bumper to the upward thruster and to the antenna, with a node to split the current. Computer Gaming World gave another: connect the antenna to the left thruster through a NOT gate, and the robot moves until it “hears” a signal.
For bigger jobs you design chips. In the lab you wire gates inside an enlarged chip, then “burn” it into a small one that fits inside a robot, and you can save it to disk. A finished chip can go inside another chip, and COMPUTE! reported that the nesting could go 40 levels deep. All three robots run their circuits at the same time and can signal each other by antenna. That reminded COMPUTE!’s columnist David Thornburg of “Smalltalk, LISP, or Logo—not the sort of thing one expects from a videogame”.
Five levels up
The game teaches itself before it tests you. Three tutorials cover robot anatomy, the toolkit of gates and wires, and chip design. The Innovation Lab lets you build and test robots and chips with nothing at stake. Then comes Robotropolis, in five levels, according to Electronic Games:
- The Sewer. The robots already there can help you escape. Computer Gaming World explained that you get past the sentry robot by riding inside one of them.
- The Subway. You have to rewire a robot.
- The Town. You build a chip and use it to program a robot.
- The Master Control Center.
- The Skyways. Here you have to search for a key, sneak past a sentry, “ride a giant disk drive to retrieve a new key, open a sonar lock by sending a pattern of antenna beeps, travel through an invisible maze” and push a series of eight buttons to reach the transport room.
Most of the puzzles come without explanation. Sentries block your way, but they let robots past, sometimes with you riding inside, “Trojan-horse style”, as Computer Gaming World put it.
Reception
Reviewers admired it and warned people off it in the same breath. Electronic Games called it “an educational game of the highest order”, but said that anyone who disliked logical and mechanical puzzles, or liked to start playing without reading the instructions, should “prepare to be totally mystified”. Computer Gaming World’s Gregg Williams admitted he was “nowhere near” the last level: “I’m cursing as much as I do with an Infocom adventure!” Home Computer Magazine’s reviewer found several things the manual did not explain and wrote that “it could take months to travel through the entire city of Robotropolis”. Enter’s reviewer Bernie renamed it “Rocky’s Gloves”, because “you can do so much more with it than with Rocky’s Boots”.
It also unsettled a competitor. Doug Sharp and Mike Johnston’s ChipWits, a game about programming a robot with picture instructions, was still in development when Robot Odyssey was announced. “I said to myself, ‘Gee, we’ve been scooped,’” Johnston told Commodore Power Play. “But we intentionally never looked at it, and we just started working harder.”
The people behind it
Electronic Games credited the design to Mike Wallace and Leslie Grimm. According to a 2014 Slate article by David Auerbach, the game was built on the code of Rocky’s Boots, which Warren Robinett had co-designed. Wallace was a 22-year-old Stanford student working in The Learning Company’s customer service when he taught himself 6502 assembly language by studying Robinett’s code. He built the technology that let circuits sit inside circuits, and Grimm directed the project and designed the five levels and the tutorials.
Later life
The game stayed on sale for years. In 1987 Radio Shack sold versions for the Tandy 1000 and PC compatibles and for the 64K Color Computer, each at $34.95. The writer Fred D’Ignazio, who called it The Learning Company’s “bestselling game”, wrote a novel based on it, Robot Odyssey I: Escape from Robotropolis, published by Tor Books in 1988.
Its reputation outlived the Apple II. In 2014 Slate ran Auerbach’s article under the headline “The Hardest Computer Game of All Time”. Auerbach was given the game at eight, and it took him 13 years to finish it. A fan remake in Java, DroidQuest, written by Thomas Foote, recreates the original levels for modern computers.
Sources
- David Thornburg, COMPUTE!, September 1984, p. 28: the CES announcement, DigiWorld, the three robots, chips nested 40 deep and messages between robots. The same issue, p. 48: Apple II price.
- Dan Goldberg, review, Electronic Games, vol. 3 no. 4, April 1985, p. 44: designers, the robots’ parts, the wiring example, the five levels and the verdict.
- Electronic Games, vol. 3 no. 2, February 1985: Apple and IBM versions, and the age range.
- Gregg Williams, “Robot Odyssey I and Chipwits”, Computer Gaming World issue 21, April/May 1985, p. 22: ages 13 and up, gates, the NOT-gate example, sentries, the Skyways, and planned sequels.
- Home Computer Magazine, vol. 5 no. 1, 1985, pp. 38–41: the tutorials, the Innovation Lab, the glowing wires, the sewer’s three robots, Apple II requirements and price.
- Enter, vol. 2 no. 5, March 1985: review.
- “The Making of Chipwits”, Commodore Power Play, vol. 4 no. 4, August/September 1985, p. 68 onwards: Mike Johnston on the June 1984 announcement.
- 80 Micro, April 1987, Radio Shack catalogue pages: Tandy 1000 and Color Computer versions and prices.
- Fred D’Ignazio, Compute!’s Gazette, June 1986 and May 1988: the novel and its publication.
- David Auerbach, “The Hardest Computer Game of All Time”, Slate, 24 January 2014 (web, secondary): Wallace, Grimm, Robinett’s code, Auerbach’s own play-through and DroidQuest.