October 1989 was a good month for handheld video games. Just a few months prior, Nintendo released the original Game Boy, which went on to become a cultural landmark. Other companies were entering the handheld gaming scene as well, and video game bigshot Atari wanted to come out swinging the biggest. The Atari Lynx was released and, well, didn’t see the success it aimed for with its lofty ambitions of color graphics, ambidextrous control scheme, and ability to link up 18 consoles at once. While the Lynx may have been a massive commercial flop, it did provide us with some gaming classics. None other may be as fondly remembered as Chip’s Challenge.
Chip’s Challenge was the creation of Chuck Sommerville. Sommerville was part of the original Lynx launch project at game company Epyx. This was a team dedicated on making games for the new handheld. Sommerville originally was working on a tank game, but hand to cancel it.
“The tank game wasn’t going to work. It was too experimental.” Sommerville told iDigitalTimes. “That’s when I started playing around with a map based puzzle game. I really wanted to make a game that I would play, and this was it.”
From there, Sommerville wrote all of the code needed for Chip’s Challenge. His game started spreading among his co-workers at the Lynx project, and they began helping him design new levels. He admits this group of designers and testers are what enabled him to finish Chip’s Challenge in time.
“We had a number of programmers that were coming off their projects for the half a dozen or so other launch games,” Sommerville said. “There was also a whole army of testers available. They helped ensure that all of these levels being created were solvable.”
Chip’s Challenge was completed in 10 weeks. It ended up featuring 148 levels.
It's here that things start taking weird turns. Sommerville ended up leaving Epyx, and found himself hopping around the games industry. For a while he worked at notable companies such as EA and 3DO. While at EA, Sommerville said that he would get letters from fans saying how much they wanted a sequel but there was nothing he could do.
“I was working for EA, so I couldn’t be working on anything else,” he said. Sommerville eventually left the games industry and to pursue a job working with LED lights.
“I wrote code for microcontrollers that worked with LED lights. I even was responsible for the lighting that went into the New Year's Eve ball in Times Square twice,” Sommerville said. It was at this time that Sommerville also started working on the highly-anticipated sequel.
Epyx, the company Sommerville worked for that owned the rights to Chip’s Challenge, began going through financial troubles. They were the original creators of the Lynx, but needed Atari to bail them out. Atari took financial responsibility for the Lynx, but didn’t promote it or market it. This left Epyx without much money. Despite porting over Chip’s Challenge to a few other consoles, most notably getting bundled in with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, Epyx was forced to shut down.
It’s interesting to note that one programmer who worked on porting Chip’s Challenge to PC was a man named Tony Garcia. Garcia would go on to be one of the founders of Microsoft Game Studios, helping them grow their games division. He is now the head of Business Development at Unity.
As the company started selling off assets before going defunct, the Chip’s Challenge rights were sold to a company called Bridgestone. Bridgestone isn’t in the video game business, they tend to focus more on Christian books and DVD sales. Bridgestone was really banking on another game, Bible Builder, and has a whole line of Christian video games. Chip’s Challenge didn’t really fit their catalog. After two years of working on Chip’s Challenge 2, Sommerville was ready to release it in 1992. He looked up who had the rights to the name Chip’s Challenge, and found Bridgestone.
“We brought them Chip’s Challenge 2, but they wouldn’t want to help me publish it. Not only that, they were asking for a ton of money just for me to use the name,” he said.
This was a ton of money that Sommerville did not have. From here it mostly became a long and drawn out standoff.
“I would have a yearly conversation to try and get the rights back, but Bridgestone would never budge.” Sommerville said.
In 2010, Sommerville met Barn Cleave. Together, they formed the video game developer/publisher Niffler. While working with Niffler, Sommerville created another puzzle game appropriately called Chuck’s Challenge. Chuck’s Challenge helped familiarize Sommerville with Steam, the PC gaming service. Chuck’s Challenge ended up becoming a modified version of Chip’s Challenge 2.
“There’s subtle differences between the two gameplay-wise,” Cleave said. “Chip’s Challenge 2 is much more the classic gameplay time capsule. Chuck’s Challenge is much more modern,” he said.
Fast forward to six months ago, as we drew upon the 25 year anniversary of Chip’s Challenge on the Lynx. Sommerville knew it was now or never. Bridgestone caved and as of May 28, 2015, Chip’s Challenge 2 finally released.
“The game was already done, all we did was update it to get it working on Steam,” he said. “I knew it would have to be released eventually. I was just afraid I wasn’t going to live to see it. I made a deal with my wife that if I died, she would leak the game to the Internet.”
So what’s Chip’s Challenge 2 even like? Well, it takes what the first Chip’s Challenge did and builds upon it. This means more tools, more complex puzzles, and even a featured level editor.
“Fans wrote their own level editors and were building their own puzzles with Chip’s Challenge. I figured I would just make it easier on them and include all of the official assets in a level builder made by myself,” he said.
This early acceptance of player-generated content could have been huge if released back in 1992, as seen in the success of games such as LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft.
This theme of players creating content for Chip’s Challenge has already carried over to the new release, as players have managed to mod Chip’s Challenge 2 to look just like the PC version many gamers are familiar with. There’s also the classic “bummer” sound clip.
“The ‘bummer’ sound clip wasn’t in the original Lynx version,” said Cleave, “so we had to re-record it to make it into the re-release.”
What both Sommerville and Cleave are most happy with is that Chip’s Challenge and Chip’s Challenge 2 will now be able to be appreciated by a whole new audience. Cleave remembers the fond memories of him and his brother memorizing codes to access levels when Chip’s Challenge was first released. He’s now excited to see what fans will do with the games now that they are out on modern PCs. “There are levels so big and complex that I don’t even know where to start.”
Both Chip’s Challenge games can be found on Steam right here.
So what do you think? Are you excited to learn that Chip’s Challenge 2 is finally out after all these years? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
