IMPOSSIBLE MISSION
A new benchmark was set for C64 gaming with the release of Impossible Mission, but Dennis Caswell let others follow-up his secret agent platformer. Dennis and the designers of Impossible Mission's sequels explain how the series evolved
Inspiration is often found by accident, but sometimes it’s deliberately sought out. The latter was the case when Dennis Caswell went to the movies and came back with the germ of an idea for his next project. Dennis then took further inspiration from a hit Atari 8-bit title, and as he explains, the result was a covert operation-themed platformer. “The idea for Impossible Mission was triggered by the movie Wargames, which I went to see with the express purpose of finding inspiration for a new game,” Dennis says. “The movie gave me the idea of infiltrating a high-tech installation of some sort, but the similarity ended there. The platform design was influenced largely by games like Jumpman, the creator of which sat down the hall from me for a time.”
Having settled on a premise and a genre for his latest project, Dennis next created a lead character, which he based on the live-action super spies of an earlier decade. “The secret agent aspect was not modelled on any specific example,” Dennis notes, “but I was strongly affected by Sean Connery’s portrayal of James Bond, as well as the many television shows created to cash in on the Sixties spy craze, such as The Man From UNCLE and, of course,
Mission: Impossible.”
A less obvious influence led Dennis to randomise the order of his spy platformer’s levels, with the hope of discouraging repetition and encouraging thoughtful play. “All of the randomisation in Impossible Mission was inspired by the old terminal game Rogue,”
Dennis explains, “and it made the game a little bit different every time you played. I didn’t want a pattern game like Pac-man, where there was a fixed sequence that players repeated mindlessly every time.”
As well as arranging his game’s stages in random order, Dennis also allowed them to be dipped in and out of rather than completing them and moving on. “It meant that part of
Impossible Mission became assessing the difficulty of a given room and determining whether to solve it immediately or come back to it later,” Dennis reasons. “One example
would be examining a room and concluding that you needed to put the robots to sleep in order to get through it, which may have meant you needed to go to some other room first to obtain the necessary ‘snooze’.”
In keeping with its random structure, Dennis randomised the threat of his game’s foes – the aforementioned robots – although he coded some to appear harmless until approached. “Each robot was randomly assigned a behaviour at the start of the game,” Dennis points out. “The purpose was to make them unpredictable, so when you encountered one for the first time you had to determine what kind of threat it posed before you knew how to evade it. The wider the variety of behaviours, the more uncertainty there was about what each one would or wouldn’t do to you. So even the easy robots were only easy once you’d made sure they wouldn’t chase you or zap you or both.”
Interestingly, considering the live-action spies who had inspired his design, Dennis opted not to arm his game’s agent, although he can see now how that might have been fun. “I’m not sure the effect would have been dramatic,” Dennis ponders. “There might have been times when you needed to traverse the same room more than once, and being able to eliminate a robot once and for all could have make that easier, but the biggest difference would have probably been the catharsis resulting from bashing an uppity droid!”
But rather than seeking revenge, Dennis tasked players with finding items, and he connected this to avoiding robots by prolonging searches for power-ups and password pieces. “The hope was that the searching mechanism would add an element of suspense,” Dennis reflects. “Because depending on what kind of robot was nearby you might have to search a little, then run away, then come back and search some more. So you had to decide how long you dared search before making your getaway.”
Keen to give players an alternative to searching for useful objects, Dennis looked to a popular toy to inform a musical sub-game that rewarded
musically inclined players. “I’ve always been a fan of the game-within-a-game,” Dennis beams. “They just broke things up and let you use a different part of your brain for a minute. The memory game in Impossible Mission was, of course, just a version of the old Milton Bradley game Simon, which was still fairly new at the time.”
Although already highly innovative, Dennis further differentiated Impossible Mission by making its hero invulnerable to harm and placing him in a race against the clock. “It seemed novel for the game to use time rather than lives as its currency,” Dennis argues. “It had to be completed in a fixed amount of time, and falling off a platform or otherwise ‘dying’ exacted a time penalty, so there was no fixed limit on the number of times you could die. Of course, if you expected to
“Part of Impossible Mission became assessing the difficulty of a given room and determining whether to solve it immediately or come back to it later” DENNIS CASWELL