Impossible Mission is a stylish, not to mention intellectual-property-skirting, game in which you play a James Bond type inside an evil genius’s headquarters. Your spy somersaults around past robot security guards, searching to collect pieces of a code. It was a favourite game of mine as a child, as was its similar sequel. I actually played Impossible Mission II right to its ending for the first time when doing gifs for AAA in 2015, demonstrating both the lasting enjoyability of playing it and the advantage of being able to look up on the internet how its code-breaking works. I played the games on a Commodore 64 though, so again the Spectrum version is new to me now.
It’s an interesting experience playing this different version of Impossible Mission. It doesn’t have a lot of the things that I remember well. The flawless smooth animations for the waistcoated main character, the amazing quality of the sound of echoing footsteps, whirring elevators and buzzing vapourisation, the cries of “aaaAAAaaaaaaAHgh” on falling through the floor: all gone. So too is some of the sense of scale and of unpredictability, that any challenge could be waiting through the next passageway, and so are lifts which move when you want even if you aren’t standing dead in the centre of them. The first set of losses are factual ones as a result of the conversion from Commodore 64 to Spectrum. The second set could be related to that too, or just the impossibility of living up to nostalgia, or both of those things intermingled. There is more than one way in which I am playing a game which is almost but not quite the one that exists in my memory.
The experience nonetheless mostly stands up. Impossible Mission is a game which runs on more complicated rules than any 2D platformer we’ve seen so far, but they come with generous concessions towards the idea of being fun rather than a repetitive ordeal. Its layout is a set of rooms, connected by elevators and corridors, which you can visit in almost any order, the only limit being that you have to go through rooms to move right or left from one elevator column to another. If you don’t like the look of a room and the objects you need to search in it, you can just run right through it and make your way to an easier one first.
And rather than giving you a certain number of lives to lose, Impossible Mission gives you a time counter with time to spare to complete the whole game, but penalises you chunks of time each time you get zapped by a robot. That means that even at the stage of not being very good at the game, rather than bashing yourself against the same failure points, you can try out different things for a bit and get a sense of progress even as you have no chance of overall success. As you get better, the game gives you competing incentives to take risks to do things faster, or to slow down and avoid time penalties. It’s such a great system that it’s a waste that it didn’t catch on more widely than it did, Prince of Persia years later being the next prominent example I am aware of. One more tweak is the fact that although there are a finite set of possible rooms, the layout of which room goes where in the map is randomly generated with each new game, keeping repetition further at bay and opening up more possibilities.
Impossible Mission’s complexities and sense of strategy run right through the finer details of what you have to do. The majority of its rooms have computer terminals and a set of objects you need to search, spread across fixed platforms interspersed with lift platforms you can move up and down on, all overseen by those security robots. The robots all look the same (a sort of BB8/Dalek hybrid) but act in different ways. Some are fixed, some patrol backwards and forwards, some chase after you at high speed. Some fire their vaporisation rays at fixed points, some only when they see you. There are a lot of different combinations, which means working out a lot of different approaches to get past them and search the rooms.
Sometimes you have to dart in and out and search an object in stages. Sometimes you need to do some complex maneuvering with lifts to reach the top of a room. Sometimes your mission is, in fact, impossible unassisted, at which point the computer terminals come in. You can use them to put the robots to sleep for a short period, using up password tokens you collect during your searches, and then race to finish off what you need to do before the robots wake up and zap you again. It’s the kind of game which requires both calculated planning and action skills for the execution of that plan. As we’ll see over the course of this project, that combination in games is one I love. Even better when, as in Impossible Mission, the balance is such that both sides are challenging but manageable.
Finally, the careful balancing of possibilities goes deeper still in the action of searching objects. You stand there and a bar counts down the time until you’re done, and after that chance for anticipation the resultant reward is randomised, an early example of the “variable ratio reinforcement schedule” principle that powers lucrative “loot boxes” in games today. You could get a puzzle piece, a useful password, or nothing at all. The heavily guarded object you have to carefully work your way towards might contain nothing. The one you can just saunter up to might have the final piece you need. You just don’t know, which makes finishing each search all the more enticing a prospect.
Throughout this post I’ve just referred to searching “objects”, but it’s worth talking about what it is that you’re looking for answers in. Throughout the game you need to make your way to a bizarre assortment of household and office objects, from lamps to fireplaces to big screens to vending machines. Together with the lack of any sign of humans present and the industrial aesthetic of everything else – the lifts decked out in fetching red and yellow hazard stripes – the effect is as much post-apocalyptic trip to Ikea as Bond villain hideout. And that is part of a sense of semi-reality that works alongside all of the carefully calibrated gameplay to make Impossible Mission such an enjoyable experience.
Plenty of other games we’ve seen have had systems of multiple lives and had the player character lose each one with a blip out of existence and reappearance. It’s always a little disconnect between the story and the means by which it’s being told. But that connecting thread was pretty loose in all of them anyway. When you’re battling flying scissors, you’ve got enough surreality to spare to smooth over the gaps. Games will later get much, much more realistic, for loaded values of that term, than Impossible Mission, but it’s already realistic enough to provoke a more thoughtful pause at each restart. When you run into a robot, your spy doesn’t just blip out, they get fuzzed into static before disappearing. Then they carry on going, less ten minutes of their time counter. In other games there is a possible rationalisation that the failure is a presentation of what might have happened, and the retry a new chance to write what really did happen in the story with the happy ending. But if that’s the case, what happened in that unseen ten minutes?
I have a theory, which to be clear I’ve only consciously thought of now, but I think was always somewhere there in my mind when playing. I think that the ultimate goal of collecting puzzle pieces to break a computer code is more closely matched in the surrounding game than is immediately apparent. The whole game is a simulation of a process of hacking into a system. The spy isn’t really in this place at all, but sitting at the same computer the game gives you for its menu screens. The ten minutes is the time it takes to re-establish a position in the system after being detected and pushed out by defences. There is a more real place where those vending machines and fireplaces make more sense, but you only get to see the virtual world where their defences are (the Internet of Things?). This theory makes the abstract incomprehensibility of the puzzle pieces make a lot more sense, too! Admittedly, “this computer programme in the form of a game is a simulation of… a computer programme!” is kind of an all-purpose way out of any game having to make sense, but in this case it fits brilliantly. It’s yet one more level to a game that’s so well-structured in offering so many different possibilities, possibilities inside possibilities, a mission of the possible.
