This Week In Retro: Impossible Mission

September 1984: "Stay awhile. Stay forever!"

by Diamond Feit

As much as I appreciate the many conveniences afforded to us by the internet, I must confess I find the modern hype cycle exhausting. Studios and publishers want us frothing with excitement for their next big product and it does not matter if it's coming in a week, a month, or even multiple years from now. I don't want to go back to relying on random television commercials or magazine blurbs for the latest release information, but I have grown weary of non-stop PR whenever I look at social media, turn on a console, or boot up Steam.

One reason I find the constant flow of advertising so irksome is that I first fell in love with video games when each new title came as a complete surprise. Granted, there were far fewer games in the world back then, but there's still something so powerful about walking into an arcade or looking at a store shelf and seeing a brand-new experience.

I often associate that sense of wonder and discovery with my Commodore 64 playing days from my youth, since I had no idea how game releases even worked in those pre-NES days. There's no way I could have specifically asked for every piece of software we owned. Rather, I'd wager that my parents would periodically bring home a new one because they thought it had educational value or they just thought it looked neat. I'm certain that's why I ended up spending hundreds of hours with Epyx's Summer Games, an Olympics simulator that my friends and I took more seriously than the actual Olympics.

Yet for all the fun I had learning to pole vault or shoot skeet, another Epyx release from 1984 captured my imagination in ways no sporting event ever could. Again, I doubt I requested my parents purchase such a game given its unfamiliar title and confusing objectives, but somehow it came into our home and I spent the better part of a year trying to understand it one play session at a time. In the end, Impossible Mission lived up to its name for me, yet while I never came close to beating it, I've also never stopped thinking about it even four decades later.

Impossible Mission challenges players to infiltrate the subterranean stronghold of Professor Elvin Atombender, a madman scheming to crack nuclear missile launch codes. Special Agent 4125 must succeed where Agents 4116 and 4124 failed by searching Atombender's secret lair for clues in order to stop his master plan. Armed only with a pocket computer and raw agility, our hero has six hours to complete their mission before the game ends.

Agent 4125 may not carry any weapons but they've clearly never skipped leg day, as they can tirelessly run and jump around Atombender's fortress with ease. The passwords they need lie scattered around the facility inside computer banks, desk drawers, and even common household furniture like beds and bookshelves. Searching each object takes a set amount of time based on its complexity, but Agent 4125 can rummage through even the largest hiding places in a matter of seconds; just don't ask what precisely they're doing when they need to investigate Atombender's toilets.

Laid out like this, Impossible Mission sounds like a misnomer, as Atombender's pad contains just 32 distinct rooms—sparsely decorated, no less. With only so many hiding places per room and a generous time limit, gathering all the intel and kicking down the professor's door seems trivial. Indeed, complete playthroughs on YouTube generally run less than 45 minutes. Given my massive amount of free time and the scarcity of software competing for my attention in 1984, why did I struggle to topple Atombender?

Firstly, the professor did not leave his dastardly den unguarded. Each room features an assortment of robots programmed to repel any intruders. Their movement patterns vary; some patrol a set course, others pursue the player on sight. Some rush at high speeds while others take their time or even stand in place. The most aggressive droids fire lightning bolts.

Agent 4125 has no health bar so any contact with a robot means instant death, although Impossible Mission does not restrict players with a limited supply of lives. A slip-up means returning to the start of the room and trying again, although any searched objects do not reset. The only penalty is that the game clock advances ten minutes after each fatal error, making that six-hour timer feel tighter than it seems.

The precise layout of Atombender's hideout and the location of all his hidden passwords also changes each time players begin their mission, adding to its complexity. Designer Dennis Caswell told Retro Gamer magazine in 2013 he got the idea from Rogue, making Impossible Mission an early example of a roguelike—years before that term became commonplace. Robot behaviors are likewise randomly distributed at the start of each game, keeping players on their toes as they cannot anticipate any counter-strategies in advance.

As a third-grader I knew nothing of Rogue, Mission: Impossible, or any of the other properties Caswell drew influence from in creating Impossible Mission. Having trained in the arcades, I tried to brute-force my way through each game, searching every single object in every single room regardless of danger. On those few occasions where I lived long enough to find all the puzzle pieces I needed to actually defeat Atombender, I couldn't make heads or tails of the irregular shapes in my inventory.

Yet I kept coming back to Impossible Mission, both frustrated and fascinated by its eccentricities. The digitized voice of Atombender welcoming me into his domain spooked me, as did the awful scream I heard whenever Agent 2145 fell into a pit. I encountered plenty of punishingly difficult or inscrutable games on the Commodore 64 but I refused to give up on Impossible Mission; getting a game over never felt unfair as it handed me so many opportunities to try and try again.

Impossible Mission must have found a wider audience than most of its contemporaries since it remains surprisingly accessible to this day. Besides multiple ports to other platforms in the 80s, a remastered version later came to consoles and handhelds in the early 2000s which includes the Commodore original as an optional bonus. You can even purchase and play this incarnation on Steam or the Nintendo Switch.

Armed with my adult gamer knowledge and decades of additional puzzle solving experience, I still cannot finish Impossible Mission—but neither can I quit Impossible Mission. In preparation for writing this column I tried emulating the Commodore 64 version and I found a browser-based version; both brought me back to my hideous 80s living room as I toiled to terminate Atombender with an Atari 2600 joystick in my hands. The professor outwitted me today just as he did in my childhood, yet even in defeat I found myself glued to the screen.

In the end, I think Atombender's sarcastic introductory quip of "Stay forever" proved more of a promise than a threat. Despite 40 years of separation between my current self and the one who played Impossible Mission every day after school, mentally I am still in Professor Atombender's cozy underground laboratory, ready to somersault over a killbot and ransack a refrigerator.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.