Robot Odyssey
| Robot Odyssey | |
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| Developer(s) | Mike Wallace, Dr. Leslie Grimm |
| Publisher(s) | The Learning Company |
| Platform(s) | Apple II, TRS-80 Color Computer, DOS |
| Release | 1984 |
| Genre(s) | Puzzle game |
| Mode(s) | Single Player |
Robot Odyssey is an adventure game, published by The Learning Company in 1984. Released for the Apple II, TRS-80 Color Computer, and DOS, it has been referred to as the hardest computer game of all time.
The player is readying himself for bed when, suddenly, he falls through the floor into an underground city of robots, Robotropolis. The player begins in the sewers of the city with three programmable robots, and must make his way to the top of the city to try to find his way home again.
The aim of Robot Odyssey is to program and control three robots (four in the last level) in order to escape Robotropolis, a labyrinthine underground city filled with hundreds of rooms of puzzles that need to be solved to progress any further. The city consists of five levels of increasing difficulty, requiring the design of more and more sophisticated robots.
A tutorial and robot testing laboratory (the Innovation lab) are also provided with the game.
Except for their color and initial programming, the three robots are identical inside. They are equipped with four thrusters and bumper sensors, a grabber, a radio antenna (for basic communication with other robots), a battery, and a periscope to use while riding inside a robot.
Throughout the game, the player is presented with various challenges which require programming the three robots to accomplish various tasks. This is done by wiring a synchronous digital circuit, consisting of logic gates and flip-flops, inside of the robots. Tasks and puzzles range from navigating a simple maze and retrieving items to complex tasks requiring interaction and communication between two or more robots. Though the player can ride inside the robots, most challenges involve the robots acting autonomously and cannot be completed with the player inside (and perhaps simply rewiring their robot on the fly).
The robots can also be wired up to chips, which provide a convenient and reproducible way to program the robots. Various pre-programmed chips are scattered throughout the city and range from complex circuits such as a wall-hugging chip which can be used to navigate through mazes and corridors (one of which is wired to a robot at the beginning) to clocks and counters. The player must find out how these chips work themselves, as the only information about each chip is a short, and sometimes cryptic, description. Additionally, there are predesigned chip files stored on the various disks containing the game that can be loaded into the in-game chips. The available chips stored in this fashion vary depending on the port or version used.
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