Supaplex

Description

Supaplex is a puzzle game reminiscent of Boulder Dash. The player controls the red Pac Man looking character called Murphy. The objective is to reach the exit, which is only opened when a certain number of Infotrons are collected (usually all in the level). The setting is inside of a computer, therefore some computer terminology describes elements found in the levels. This includes destructible RAM chips, indestructible hardware, utility disks (which are explosives), terminals, and ports (one or two way gates). The most common enemy is a zonk, a rock which falls and rolls downwards, and explodes if it comes in contact with some, but not all other game elements. One of the most common enemies are a scissor looking enemy called snik snak which always moves in a predictable pattern.

Some levels feature gravity, where Murphy will fall down if he stands still, and has nothing beneath him. Other elements have fixed rules, such as Infotrons and Zonks always falls down, while RAM and hardware always stays put. There are 111 levels in total, and up to three of these may temporarily be skipped to advance. The game allows several profiles so that players may use the same computer with their own progression.

Alternate Titles

• "Think!" -- Amiga working title

Part of the Following Groups

• Boulder Dash variants
• Supaplex series

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User Reviews

Man, was it addictive - but I FINALLY completed all levels	DOS	Karin Carroll (3)
Probably the game I spent most time with of all games!	DOS	Erwin Bergervoet (304)
One of the most addictive games to grace the PC.	DOS	Tomer Gabel (4418)

The Press Says

Amiga Action	Amiga	Nov, 1991	84 out of 100	84
GameHippo.com	DOS	Oct 11, 1999	8 out of 10	80

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Trivia

Development

The original Supaplex programmer Philip Jespersen about the game's development (from his personal homepage, January 1996):

The Amiga Fever extended into my first "serious" project, which turned to be a computer game called "Think!" which was a BoulderDash inspired game. "Think!" which was eventually released europe-wide by Digital Integration as "Supaplex" and was written 100% in Assembler and featured many nice programming tricks and high speed graphics. Digital Integration (Robin Heydon) also ported the game to MS-DOS, but I still prefer the Amiga Version, as its controls are better. As a requirement set by Digital Integration "Supaplex" had to run on any 512KB RAM Amiga machine, which turned out to be a serious problem, which only could be solved by writing own direct floppy disk read/write code (MFM coding was quite quite difficult as there was hardly any documentation available at all). I also had to setup my own stack management, because as the boot code of the floppy got loaded, no "official" stack was created by the operating system, which in any case got completely wiped out anyway by "Supaplex". Hence no Harddisk Version was ever released, although nowadays in would be no problem no all, as everybody today seems to have gigabytes of RAM (well, maybe a bit or two less)...

A complete copy of his site can be downloaded under http://www.bd-fans.com/Files/Classic_Supaplex/Philip_Jespersen.zip
It also contains another .zip with photos of Philip Jespersen, Michael Stopp and Robin Heydon.