The Incredible Machine

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The Incredible Machine is a series of computer games originally designed and coded by Kevin Ryan and produced by Jeff Tunnell, developed by now-defunct Jeff Tunnell Productions and published by Dynamix; the 1993 through 1995 versions had the same development team, but the later 2000-2001 titles had different designers. All versions were published by Sierra Entertainment.

The general objective of the games is to create a series of Rube Goldberg devices: arrange a given collection of objects in a needlessly complex fashion so as to perform some simple task (for example, \"put the ball into a box\" or \"light a candle\"). Available objects ranged from simple ropes and pulleys to electrical generators, bowling balls and even cats and mice. The levels usually have some fixed objects that cannot be moved by the player, and so the only way to solve the puzzle is carefully arrange the given objects around the fixed items. There is also a \"freeform\" option that allows the user to \"play\" with all the objects with no set goal or to also build their own puzzles with goals for other players to attempt to solve.

The series featured the following games:

The Incredible Machine (1992, MS-DOS / Macintosh); The Even More Incredible Machine (1992, MS-DOS / Microsoft Windows); Sid & Al's Incredible Toons (1993, MS-DOS); The Incredible Toon Machine (1994, Microsoft Windows); The Incredible Machine 2 (1994, MS-DOS / Macintosh); The Incredible Machine 3 (1995, Microsoft Windows / Macintosh); Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions (2000, Microsoft Windows / Macintosh); The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions (2001, Microsoft Windows / Macintosh);

The original The Incredible Machine, the first game in the series, was originally going to be developed for Electronic Arts for the Commodore 64 in 1984, but Dynamix worked on Arcticfox for the Amiga instead and work didn't start on The Incredible Machine until the spring of 1993. The Even More Incredible Machine was actually an extended version of the original The Incredible Machine and had around 160 levels, about twice the amount of levels in the original game, and also had quite a few more parts.

The Incredible Machine 2 introduced new levels, an extended assortment of parts, a new interface, significantly improved graphics, sounds and music, and two player hotseat play. It also improved on the \"freeform\" mode, allowing players to create completely playable puzzles by defining not only the participating parts, but also the set of circumstances under which the puzzle will be considered \"solved\". In terms of gameplay, this version provided the biggest addition to the series, while subsequent updates were basically only ports of the game to newer operating systems with updated graphics/sounds and sometimes new puzzles, but no new parts.

Read more at Wikipedia.org