Robot Odyssey is a digital logic game developed by Mike Wallace and Dr. Leslie Grimm and published by The Learning Company in December 1984. It is a sequel to Rocky's Boots, and was released for the Apple II, TRS-80 Color Computer, and MS-DOS. The player is readying for bed when, suddenly, they fall 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 their way to the top of the city to try to find their way home again. Most players have found it challenging.

Gameplay

The aim of Robot Odyssey is to program and control robots (Sparky, Checkers, and Scanner with a fourth added in later levels) 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 circuits.

Legacy

The engine for the game was written by Warren Robinett, and variants of it were used in many of The Learning Company's graphical adventure games of the time, including Rocky's Boots, Gertrude's Secrets, Gertrude's Puzzles, and Think Quick!, all of which are similar but easier logic puzzle games. The gameplay and visual design were derived from Robinett's influential Atari 2600 video game, Adventure.

ChipWits by Doug Sharp and Mike Johnston, a 1984 game for Macintosh later ported to the Apple II, and Commodore 64 computers, is similar in theme but the player's robot behaviour is programmed with actions blocks instead of using logic flops, switches, etc.

Epsitec Games created Colobot and Ceebot for Windows. The player programs machines through object-oriented programming like Java, C++, or C# to accomplish puzzle tasks. The objective of these games was to teach the player the fundamentals of these languages.

Carnage Heart involves programming mechas that then fight without any user input.

Cognitoy's MindRover is also similar in spirit to Robot Odyssey, but uses different programming concepts in its gameplay.

Clones

One Girl One Laptop productions created a free to download spiritual successor, for Windows and MacOS, called GATE which uses the same digital logic puzzles as Robot Odyssey.

There is also a clone that can be run in any system with a Java runtime, DroidQuest, which contains all the original levels and an additional secret level.

Further reading

  • Escape from Robotropolis - 1988 book by Fred D'Ignazio, published by TOR ()

See also

  • Armored Core: Formula Front
  • Armored Core: Verdict Day, featuring UNACs, AI controlled Armored Cores which players can create and customize
  • BASIC STUDIO Powerful Game Koubou, a 2001 PS2 game creation title by Artdink featuring a sample game based on their title Carnage Heart
  • Breeder, a 1986 Famicom algorithm-based simulation combat game by SoftPro
  • ChipWits
  • COMSIGHT, a 1987 PC88, X1, and X68000 algorithm-based simulation combat game by Technosoft
  • MindRover
  • Omega (video game)
  • Pandora Project: The Logic Master, a 1996 PS1 algorithm-based simulation combat game by Team Bughouse similar to Carnage Heart
  • Robot X Robot, a 1999 PS1 algorithm-based simulation combat game by Nemesys
  • RoboSport
  • Logic simulation

References

  • A reimplementation in Java
  • A binary patch for running Robot Odyssey on modern computers
  • Robot Odyssey chip disassembler
  • A version playable in the browser
  • Disk image from Internet Archive