Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

I was 13 years old and feeling sick one day (one of many days that turned out to be from recently discovered food allergies). My parents decided to let me stay home from school. Two days before this I had ordered Mission Impossible for my Acorn Electron and wasn’t expecting it to arrive by mail for another week when it popped through my mailbox that morning. I rushed to open the package, pulled the cassette tape out of its holder, put it into my tape recorder and typed “CHAIN *.*” . Within ten seconds, the screeching and scrawing of the tape only added to the anticipation I had to play this game. As soon as it loaded, I was all over it, actually managing to complete the game that day, which was a first for me, and something I’ve yet to repeat. For years afterwards, I’d bring this game out when I’d get annoyed with Elite. Ah, those were glory days back then, back when I had lots of free gaming time and didn’t mind a 10 minute load for each game.

The platforming in this game was part of the fun. Much like in Prince of Persia, timing was everything. You only had a set amount of time to complete the game and stop the evil Professor Atombender from succeeding as his evil plans. Rooms on different levels were accessed by an elevator system, and you had to dodge various robot sentries to access the computer terminals scattered throughout the game. Accessing these terminals allowed you to send various robots to sleep as well as resetting lifts in each room. Furniture held parts of the password that you needed to compile so that you could finally capture Professor Atombender in his secret room, and once you had all the parts you could compile it. From the first time that I did a somersault over a sentry robot while playing the game on my friend’s Commodore 64, I fell in love with this game.

Lately, the Wii remake of the game has been announced and has garnered some acclaim as being the first non-emulated Virtual Console game to be released by Nintendo. This is pretty awesome news because it means the game has been written for specific platforms, not that it really needs it. It runs perfectly under emulation. There’s DS, PSP and PS2 versions coming soon as well according to the developer website (System 3). 

You can still play this game under emulation on a number of platforms, including the original Commodore 64 version. There was a second game in the series which I didn’t enjoy as much, but that could simply be because the first game was so much fun that a sequel seemed superfluous.

Links

• Impossible Mission Wikipedia Entry
• Classic Gaming Caspule Review of Impossible Mission
• Impossible Mission Remake for PSP, DS, Wii and PS2 (Holding Page)
• Elite Wikipedia Entry

Categories: Retro, Retro Tuesday //