I loved Sierra’s games: it was my gateway into the world of computers and was my inspiration for being a software engineer. I still have all my Sierra games, original boxes, documentation, and disks.
I also have a few—around 24 issues of InterAction magazine.
Incredible Machine was different than most other of Sierra’s point n click adventures but still inspired nonetheless.
My plan at one point was to move to Coursegold California and contribute to building the next Sierra adventure...
Oh well...I’m older now, and just hack on distributed systems...but thank you Sierra for allowing me to be inspired and intrigued of what it means to create...
please keep in mind sierra was "just" the publisher for a lot (most?) of these games, such as the one in question (TIM) which were actually developed by other game studios.
In the early ‘90s era almost all Sierra games were developed in-house. The Incredible Machine is a special case because it was developed by Jeff Tunnell who had previously co-founded a game company (Dynamix) that Sierra had acquired. So when he wanted to do his own thing outside of Sierra’s multimedia-oriented production system, Sierra decided to publish his game rather than lose him.
And it still inspires! A year ago I released (open source) "Quantum Game with Photons": http://quantumgame.io/.
I pretty much make it explicit:
"Wave optics and quantum mechanics as a game. Play for fun! Learn quantum mechanics as a side effect. It’s a puzzle game, heavily inspired by The Incredible Machine and Chromatron."
I found TIM and TIM2 in 1996 on a compilation CD. First I was after Warcraft, Command and Conquer and Dune, but when you don't have an Internet connection or money to buy games, you try out every last game on every CD you find :D
It was basically the Minecraft of that time. I played this game in sandbox mode only, didn't even realize it had a puzzle mode, because I didn't speak English at that time.
TIM was one of my favorite games of all time. One of the nicest features of it is that for more complex puzzles, there were so many different ways of achieving the result, sometimes in very strange and peculiar ways. Most games at the time did not allow such freedom to the player.
The modern, truly amazing unofficial "remake" of this game would be <strong>Crazy Machines 3</strong>. http://www.crazy-machines.com/
Crazy Machines started in 2004 with the same idea as the Incredible Machine, but the company behind it never disappeared and just kept going and going...
The makers have a new game called Contraption Maker, which I have yet to download, as I feared it will consume me like TIM series did when I was growing up. These are some of my favorite games of all time.
After just learning about Contraption Maker from the comments here, I couldn't stop myself from buying it.... So far, I'm pleasantly surprised – it's close enough to TIM that I'm happy!
So, maybe being stronger than I was and holding off instead is a good idea ;)
> One need only glance at a screenshot to be reminded of the old children’s board game cum toy Mouse Trap, a simplistic exercise in roll-and-move whose real appeal is the elaborate
Either I'm very tired or someone made a horrible typo.
The Incredible Machine was my favorite game growing up! My indie studio is currently developing a similar chain reaction game called Ruberg but for VR: http://rubergthegame.com/
Just another "this is one of my favorite games growing up" post that have popped up here. This is one of my favorite games growing up.
The version I owned had over 100 puzzles. After beating them all, to this day, I lost the will to play any other similar puzzle games. I have this feeling of, been there to Nth degree. Some puzzles were very hard and took many tries.
We had to play this game during math class (at age 12, approx '95), no joke. Think it was like 2 lessons of 50 min each. Some people weren't familiar with DOS. The first 5 min of the class was getting the game running.
I was already familiar with games such as Lemmings though. Puzzle games are great for children. I'd love a more recent Steam port for my kid.
This game I loved and played a lot. I liked puzzle games more than most other genres besides horizontal shmups and I played a lot of them since the early 80s; this one stood out. I am reimplementing several other old ones to get back into game dev (with the Godot engine).
Wow, I remember playing Creative Contraptions on our Franklin Ace 1200. I also loved the game mouse trap and had more fun playing with the contraptions than the board game itself. I also later on bought the incredible machine for windows. Good stuff.
Was fortunate to meet Jeff Tunnell a few years back at PAX West, shockingly humble guy for someone whose work was a huge part of my childhood. It was inspiring to see someone stick to that indie development mindset after all those years.
One of my favorite games as well. Pleasantly surprised when there was a Swedish iOS app for kids with similar concepts, Pettson och Findus uppfinningar, that my five year old nephew showed me.
