Impossible Mission (video game)

"Another visitor. Stay awhile. Stay FOREVER!"

A video game created by Epyx for the Commodore 64 and a few other contemporary systems. The resident Mad Scientist is plotting to blow up the world, and you play a secret agent who has to stop him. You do this by running and jumping through a large number of rooms to search the furniture in each. Hidden in the furniture are thirty-six punch cards; combining four of these will give you a letter of the nine-letter password you require to enter the mad scientist's base.

Of course, the rooms are also filled with laser-shooting robots, that disintegrate you at a touch. You didn't think a game by this name was going to be easy, did you?

The game shows examples of the following tropes:

 * All There in the Manual. The mad scientist's name is Elvin Atombender, which is never mentioned in-game.
 * Blackout Basement: Some rooms in the second game require a Light Bulb item to navigate.
 * Bottomless Pit: Many of the rooms feature these. Of course, forcing one enemy through the pit causes it to Wrap Around at the top.
 * Game Breaking Bug: The Atari port of the game is known to be (randomly but often) actually impossible, because some of the cards you need can be behind computer terminals, which cannot be searched.
 * Magic Countdown: In the first game, the clock counts forward to 6:00:00 until Doomsday Device activates. In the sequel, the clock counts down, but there's a per-section countdown and a global countdown.
 * Nintendo Hard.
 * Procedural Generation. An early example.
 * Unexplained Recovery. After disintegrating, no less. However, the clock advances by 10 minutes with each death.
 * Video Game Lives: You seem to have infinite lives, but you really have six hours before the bomb goes off, and each death subtracts ten minutes from the clock. When time is up, Elvin's maniacal laughter sounds and the screen fades to white.
 * Synthetic Voice Actor. An early example. "Destroy him, my robots!"