A tale of nerds in love....

Those of you old enough to remember the Atari Lynx may remember one of its better titles - the launch game, Chip's Challenge. Developed by Chuck Sommerville while he was at Epyx (the people who originally created the Lynx), the game was designed to be a challenging, pick-it-up-and-never-put-it-down puzzler. Rather than being about falling blocks or shuffling tiles, Chip is an evolution of the maze game - and overhead run around, dodging and manipulating monsters, switches and tools to ensure victory, allowing Chip to make it through Melinda the Marvel's science clubhouse and win her heart (as far as stories about self-proclaimed nerds go, it's still more believable than The Big Bang Theory).

The game was launched on the Lynx and, despite not being the most technically impressive release on that console (which was capable of great things: several superb arcade conversions can be found on it) it remained one of the system's pillars. Epyx went on to convert it to several 8-bit computers (the Commodore 64 version is quite good) and Microsoft licensed it themselves for conversion to DOS and, most famously, Microsoft Windows, where it became a part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack.

This is where I first encountered it, when our 286 was upgraded to Windows 3.0 and boy did I love it. I was about 6 and not very good at it, it's got to be said, but as I grew older the game revealed more and more of its secrets to me (and the internet came along and then I could find out all the passwords). The Microsoft conversion is not well liked by Somerville himself, as the enemies move solidly from tile-to-tile, whereas previously they were somewhat more smoothly animated. This, occasionally, made it hard to tell which way they were going. I couldn't have cared less at the time, I thought the game was absolutely fantastic.

Sommerville set about creating a sequel in the early 1990s, but it was knocked on the head by copyright disputes (especially after Epyx went bankrupt, a piece of business trickery by Atari that makes one wonder at the decency of human beings - well, at least human beings in multi-million dollar businesses). It languished, finished but unreleasable. Sommerville released Chuck's Challenge 3d, a lovely little spiritual sequel, and fundamentally similar games like The Land of Um made appearances, but nothing really scratched that Chip's Challenge itch, especially as the original has been out of print since the Windows 95 era.

Until now, as Chip's Challenge has not only been released on Steam, but also the long awaited sequel, and a level editor. The sequel is fundamentally more of the same, but with new assets and stacks of new levels. The level editor supplants a long unofficial one based on the Microsoft version. The new version is closer, aesthetically, to the Lynx original than the Windows port, which may or may not thrill you (I personally preferred the Windows version's look, but I suspect that's largely because it's what I grew up with). The game certainly isn't ugly, at any rate, and is now accompanied by jaunty piano music which never quite grates - or it hasn't yet. I've only just started playing.

The glory of Chip's Challenge is that, as much as you can sink hours into solving its puzzles, it's also something you can have a quick blast on on a coffee break, flicking to and from it as a nice little diversion. A GOG release wouldn't go astray (Steam is nice on my home PC but I would like a DRM-free version for my laptop), but all up, Chip's Challenge is a blast from the past that still feels as fun, refreshing, and simultaneously familiar-but-unique as ever it did.