Impossible Mission II

About Impossible Mission II

Impossible Mission II (1988) is Novotrade's sequel to Epyx's Impossible Mission, in which the agent infiltrates Elvin Atombender's nine-tower fortress, cracking number puzzles and assembling a musical password.

Impossible Mission II in Depth

Continuing directly from the first game, Elvin Atombender is seeking revenge and the player must stop him. His fortress has nine towers, eight of them themed around subjects such as computers, cars and furniture. Each tower's rooms are linked by two vertical corridors with lifts, while horizontal corridors to other towers are locked until a numerical puzzle is solved: each tower holds the numbers zero to nine in three colours, and a computer terminal lets the player test combinations. The lift to the central tower needs a password encoded in music, with a piece locked in a safe in each outer tower; the final password needs six distinct pieces, and because two are duplicates the player must rewind the tape to record over one.

The main additions are new robots and devices. Alongside security bots there are shovel bots that push the agent off platforms, suicide bots that jump off with him, mine bots that lay deadly mines, harmless pest bots that ride the lifts and get in the way, and squat bots that spring up and fling the player to a higher floor or crush him against the ceiling; the flying ball robot is gone. As well as snoozes that freeze robots and lift resets, players can now collect timed bombs and contact mines to blow holes in floors or open safes. Critics praised its challenging puzzles, impressive animation and tension against the clock.

Making Impossible Mission II

Novotrade developed it and Epyx published it in 1988 for the C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Enterprise 128, NES, MS-DOS, Atari ST, Apple II, Apple IIGS and Amiga. Work on the C64 and Spectrum ports began once the Atari ST version was nearly done, and Spectrum programmer László Szenttornyai said the NES version "almost wasn't released because of the strict situation between Epyx and Nintendo." Reviews were mixed, criticising how little it changed from the original and its very limited sound. It was later followed by the Amiga-only Impossible Mission 2025 and included on the C64 Mini.