Code Mystics Inc.

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In the Fall of 2009, Code Mystics was contemplating many different directions to go with its arcade-games-in-a-browser technology. In addition to online multiplayer and 16-bit games, we were looking at other ways to bring a social dimension to these classic games.

We were struck how the game Adventure was a fun experience that had great potential to be a crossover success. It was simple and approachable, but still challenging. What was missing for a social medium such as the web was the interaction with others. The original game even lacked scoring. We'd added a leaderboard for best completion time, but we wanted to take the interaction further.

A great way to do that, we thought, was to give the users the ability to make their own levels to share. Sharing and challenging each other on custom maps you created yourself seemed a great way to bring a social aspect to the game, and so that's exactly what we did:

We created a level editor that allowed players to alter the original ROMs' rooms and how they connected. Given time we'd expand this into a full-fledged world builder. The editor was even built on the same abstraction technology as our emulation itself, which means it could be quickly brought to any platform the game itself could.

The only catch for the in-browser rendition of Adventure was needing a place to store your creations where they could easily be shared. Atari hadn't built its Atari Play browser-gaming back-end for the social features we'd need, unfortunately. Since their focus was elsewhere by that time and the new server work would be a significant undertaking, our proposal never got beyond our prototype editor. Still, browser gaming hasn't gone anywhere, so it's an idea we hope to have the opportunity to revisit one day.