The Incredible Machine

The Incredible Machine is a puzzle video game released in 1993, and the first release in The Incredible Machine video game series. The game was originally going to be developed by Electronic Arts for the Commodore 64 in 1984, but Dynamix worked on Arcticfox for the Amiga instead and work did not start on The Incredible Machine until the spring of 1993. Kevin Ryan programmed The Incredible Machine in nine months, on a $36,000 budget. The Even More Incredible Machine was an extended version of the original The Incredible Machine and had 160 levels, about twice the number of levels in the original game, and also had quite a few more parts.

The player has to assemble a Rube Goldberg-type contraption to solve a simple puzzle. The game consists of a series of puzzles, each having a simple objective, such as 'put the baseball into the basket' or 'turn on the fan'. To achieve this, the player is given a number of parts such as: balls, girders, rope, balloons, seesaws, cats or monkeys, and his job is to arrange and connect them on the playfield, so that, upon clicking the 'start puzzle' button, the whole contraption activates and achieves the objective.

For added difficulty, some puzzles have different gravity or air pressure from that of Earth. There is also a freeform mode where the player is given an unlimited number of parts to construct a machine of his own invention. The machines created this way can be saved to disk.

The Incredible Machine was nominated for an award at the 1993 Game Developers Conference, and was the winner of several prizes due to its innovative style and simulation abilities. It was innovative enough that Sid & Al's Incredible Toons earned Jeff Tunnell and Chris Cole a patent for the game concepts. The Incredible Machine for iPad/iPhone also won Best iPhone/iPad Game and was nominated for Best Puzzle Game at E3 by IGN.