Indie Luvin’ Double Feature: ChipWits II & Return to Dark Castle

When I was 10 years old, we moved to another province. One of the first friends I made in our new community was a kid named Fraser. In a far corner of Fraser’s basement, his parents had a Macintosh 128k covered in a protective plastic sheet. Although it was strictly taboo (the Mac was only to be used for word processing!), when his parents were busy upstairs Fraser and I would sneak into the room and quietly load up a few games he had copied from our school’s library. Two of the games that we secretly giggled over in front of that monochrome screen remain burned into my childlike mind to this day: ChipWits and Dark Castle.

ChipWits was an edutainment game that was released in the early days of the Macintosh. One part puzzler and one part GUI-based programming teacher, ChipWits used an icon-driven programming language (IBOL) to command a miniature robot on rollerskates around a room. Through combinations of operators and arguments, the robot would traverse the room picking up, eating, or frying objects at your maniacal whim. I don’t doubt that games such as The Incredible Machine, and more recently Chibi-Robo, gained much of their inspiration from this classic.

Dark Castle was a mixed action/puzzler/platformer that put you in the shoes of the bumbling adventurer Duncan in his quest to defeat the Black Knight. The game featured eery waveform sound effects and wonderful character animation reminiscent of later ‘rotoscoped’ animation. (Interesting side note: Co-developer Jonathan Gay later came to pioneer the now-ubiquitous Flash animation software. The designer and illustrator Mark Pierce later became the co-founder of software giant Macromedia. Holy jebus!) Full of slapstick humor and frustrating puzzles, Dark Castle is probably one of the least known indie masterpieces of the 1980’s.

Unfortunately, neither of these games have been playable on modern systems without frustratingly clunky emulation software. That is, until now! I was very pleasantly surprised when I found out that both have been remade into modern sequels by indie developers:

Return to Dark Castle (Mac OS X only) has been in production for the better part of 7 years. Originally developed for Mac OS 9, the game engine had to be completely reprogrammed for OS X, and the art had to be redrawn for a 16-bit color depth. Since then, the game has went through years of bumpy roads; finally making it to an immanent final release through its publisher, Super Happy Fun Fun. For now, I strongly suggest downloading the latest demo beta (link courtesy of the Dark Castle forums) and playing it through. The demo is rather short, but demonstrates the potential the final release of the game will have, especially considering that the full version will include all of the levels from the original Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle, the new levels for Return to Dark Castle and a level editor. The production quality is simply stunning and demonstrates the kind of polish that is possible when a game receives nearly 10 years (!) of attention. The final release of the game is definitely on my 2008 must-buy list. Now, someone just has to convince ZSculpt to port this to XBOX 360 Live Arcade…

Edit: If you want to keep up on the latest news for Return to Dark Castle, head on over to the Dark Castle Blog.

After stumbling upon Doug Sharp’s blog a few months ago on an unrelated search, I found out that a beta of ChipWits II has been released! The original programmers, Doug Sharp and Mike Johnston, re-wrote the entire game from scratch using the Adobe AIR Flash framework - meaning that it’s playable on both Windows and Mac! The sequel very much captures the enjoyment of the original, and it’s great seeing these oldschool designers back on the saddle. So head on over to the ChipWits II web site and give it a try. Even 25 years later, it’s still great edutainment software since the goals have stayed the same, so if you have kids let them take a crack at some procedural programming. The only criticism I have is that I miss the old ChipWits interface… there’s something slightly clunky about this one. Hopefully that gets resolved for the final version…

Update: The original ChipWits was remade for the Windows platform by Klaus Breuer. Klaus painstakingly reprogrammed the entire game from start to finish, and it’s available as freeware at his web site. I highly recommend playing the original, and this is the next best thing.