With others, Bone helped cultivate an online community of fans that has maintained "a serious but small following throughout the years," he said.
I think they were the first custom level set to hit the Internet.” When I had 50 of them made, I posted them to a Chip’s Challenge fan site. “I found an early level editor a guy had designed for it and began making levels. I was obsessed.”īone would go on to rediscover the game when his family got its first 33K modem. “When I was back at home I would make levels on paper with little cutout push blocks and bombs, and ice rink mazes. “I would pretty much walk in with the family, hug my grandparents, and ask to play Chip’s Challenge,” he told Ars. He played the game on his grandpa’s 386 whenever he’d go to visit. Joshua Bone was one of those early super-fans. On the PC, the game gained a devoted following of players who wanted more than the nearly 150 levels in the original game.
While the Lynx and the original Chip’s Challenge both failed to find much of an audience, the game found new life after being ported to Windows in 1991 and later distributed widely through those Entertainment Packs. “It probably would have never been approved if I had just gone to the marketing department and said, 'Hey I want to do this game.' But Epyx suddenly had the resources available, and it was the game I wanted to do because I wanted to play it." “It was a kind of a game I had always been thinking about,” Somerville told Ars. To fill an unexpected hole in the Lynx’s launch lineup, developer Chuck Somerville marshaled a team of idle programmers at Epyx (the company that originally designed the Lynx) to throw the game together in the 10-week window before the system’s release. The original Chip’s Challenge actually started as a launch title for Atari’s failed handheld, the Lynx, in 1989. A Windows 3.1 cult classicĮnlarge / Box art for the original Lynx version of Chip's Challenge.To explain why Chip’s Challenge 2 couldn’t be released when it was completed in 1999, we have to go back to the creation of the first game.
In fact, Chip’s Challenge 2 has actually been complete for over 15 years a lost classic trapped in limbo thanks to a prolonged publishing battle involving the decline of Atari, a devoted modding community, and a religious software house. But this isn’t the usual story of a developer revamping a long-neglected classic gaming property using today’s game design lessons. Late last month, that cult hit finally saw the release of a proper sequel, Chip’s Challenge 2, which hit Steam over 25 years after the first game’s release. The surprisingly deep tile-based puzzle game was part of the fourth Microsoft Entertainment Pack and later its " Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack." Thus, it came pre-installed on millions of off-the-shelf systems made by OEMs, and the game was purchased by millions more early Windows gamers. If you ever looked through the Games folder on an early to mid-'90s Windows PC-pre-Internet you had to seek out distraction-there's a decent chance you’d have stumbled on Chip's Challenge.