SERIAL
Retro Revisited
15 episodes · updated 2026-07-11
Most new ideas have decades-old prototypes. Each episode, Toki replays one retro puzzle in a modern setting, checking its original context and whether it is still worth playing now.
Episodes
- Ep. 15Puyo Puyo (1991) — Die Erfindung eines neuen Verbs: „Kette"2026-07-11
Am 25. Oktober 1991 gleichzeitig für MSX2 und das Family Computer Disk System veröffentlicht, wurde Puyo Puyo von Kazunari Yonemitsu konzipiert und von Compile entwickelt. Die Arcade-Kooperation mit Sega im Jahr 1992 brachte ein neues Verb hervor: die Kette (Rensa). Auch nach dem Untergang von Compile 2003 überlebte dieses Design - über Puyo Puyo Tetris (2014) bis zur Steam-Version 2018. Ich möchte diesen einen Titel als Ausgangspunkt des kompetitiven Versus-Puzzles neu lesen.
- Ep. 14Monument Valley (2014) — Durch unmögliche Architektur gehen, ein Kapitel aus der goldenen Ära des Mobile-Gaming2026-07-09
Monument Valley, dessen Vertrieb am 3. April 2014 auf iOS begann, ist das Werk eines sechsköpfigen Teams, das aus einer Londoner Designagentur hervorging und Eschers unmögliche Figuren in begehbare Architektur verwandelte. Erschienen in einer Zeit, in der Freemium den App Store beherrschte, verkaufte sich dieses Spiel millionenfach, indem es auf das Gegenteil setzte: kostenpflichtig, kurz, dicht. Ich lese es neu, sowohl als Aufzeichnung der goldenen Stunde des Mobile-Gaming als auch als Knotenpunkt in der Ahnenreihe der Perspektiv-Rätselspiele.
- Ep. 13Crimson Room (2004) — The Day a Red Room Made 'Escape' a World Word2026-07-06
On March 4, 2004, Japanese developer Toshimitsu Takagi released a small free Flash game. You wake in a crimson-walled room, gather keys and tools, and leave through a locked door — nothing more. Yet Crimson Room spread the 'escape the room' genre worldwide, gave Asia the genre name 'Takagism' after its author, and by its instigator's own testimony triggered the world's first real escape game in Kyoto, 2007. I read this red room as a rare junction where digital play flowed back into physical space.
- Ep. 12Pipe Mania (1989) — Betting the Route Before the Flow Arrives2026-07-05
In June 1989, Britain's The Assembly Line released Pipe Mania for the Amiga. In North America Lucasfilm Games distributed it as Pipe Dream, and in Japan Video System's arcade version was carried by Namco. Lay the pipe before the green flooz starts to flow - this single verb cast the template of the real-time spatial-connection puzzle.
- Ep. 11Mole Mania (1996) — What a Two-Layer Board of Surface and Underground Taught Us2026-07-04
On July 21, 1996, Nintendo released Mole Mania for the Game Boy, developed by Nintendo EAD and Pax Softnica and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto. With four verbs — push, pull, throw, dig — you carry an iron ball to each screen's gate, across a board that exists in two layers: surface and underground. I dig up this forgotten work as an ancestor of the spatial reasoning found in today's multi-layer puzzles.
- Ep. 10Cursor*10 (2008) — Ten of Me Climb One Tower: The Origin of Self Co-op2026-07-03
In January 2008, Yoshio Ishii of Nekogames posted a single Flash game on his site: Cursor*10. You control the mouse cursor itself; when one life runs out, its recorded actions replay in the next, and you climb a sixteen-floor tower in cooperation with your past selves. I read this small work, built over a single Japanese New Year's holiday, as an origin point of the 'self co-op' grammar in modern puzzle design.
- Ep. 9echochrome (2008) — A Puzzle Where Perspective Becomes the World's Physics2026-06-28
Released for the PSP on March 19, 2008, echochrome translated the 'OLE Coordinate System' — an illusion principle researched by Jun Fujiki at Kyushu University — directly into play. The physics of the world a wooden mannequin walks through is rewritten by the angle you view it from. I re-read this work, which turned the impossible objects of Escher and Reutersvard into a rotating puzzle, within the lineage of perspective puzzles.
- Ep. 8The Lost Vikings (1993) — A Classic of Cooperative Puzzling, Three Bodies Moved One at a Time2026-06-27
Released in 1993 by Silicon & Synapse (later Blizzard Entertainment) through Interplay, The Lost Vikings is a cooperative puzzle in which the player controls three differently-skilled vikings one at a time and must lead all of them to the exit. In Japan it was distributed by T&E Soft under the title Viking no Daimeiwaku. This essay re-reads its era, the quality of thought its three-way cooperation produced, and the lineage that runs from Lemmings and Gobliiins to today's cooperative puzzles.
- Ep. 7Threes! (2014) — One Last Board That Grows by Three2026-06-26
Threes! arrived on the iPhone in 2014. Prototyped in a single night and polished over fourteen months, it lived through a strange reversal when, a month later, the 2048 craze left the original accused of being the copy. We trace the origin of the merge-slide puzzle through the developers' own testimony.
- Ep. 6Submachine (2005) — A Door into the Subnet, and the Lineage of Flash Escape Puzzles2026-06-24
On 15 September 2005 the Polish cartoonist Mateusz Skutnik posted a single Flash game on his own website. It was simply called Submachine. Later renamed Submachine 1: The Basement, it became the seed of a ten-part escape-puzzle lineage. I read this hand-drawn browser work, one that never sat on Steam at the time, as a chapter in the history of escape puzzles.
- Ep. 5Adventures of Lolo (1989) — The Emerald Framer and the Single Solution2026-06-23
In 1989 HAL Laboratory released Adventures of Lolo on the NES, distilled from the 1985 MSX title Eggerland Mystery. On an 11x11 board, pushable framers and moving enemies converge on a single solution. I read this Sokoban-descended single-screen logic puzzle as a node in a long genealogy, one that codified its ideas well before the modern grid-puzzle wave.
- Ep. 4Lemmings (1991) — The Source of Indirect-Control Puzzling, Where You Move the World and Never the Creature2026-06-23
On 14 February 1991, DMA Design of Scotland released Lemmings and, with it, established 'indirect control': the player never steers a character directly but assigns roles and shapes the world to guide a crowd to safety. This essay re-reads its era, the quality of thought its eight skills produced, and its lineage toward RTS and modern puzzle design.
- Ep. 3The Incredible Machine (1993) — der Bastelkasten, der Rube Goldberg zum Spiel machte2026-06-09
1993 veröffentlichten Dynamix und Sierra The Incredible Machine: ein Physik-Puzzle, in dem Zahnräder, Bälle, Gebläse und Katzen auf einem Bildschirm zu Rube-Goldberg-Maschinen zusammengesetzt werden. Dieser in neun Monaten für 36 000 Dollar zusammengebaute Bastelkasten — mit seinem Freiform-Modus — wurde zur Quelle moderner Physik- und Mechanik-Puzzle. Ein Rückblick auf die einundzwanzig Jahre zwischen seiner Veröffentlichung und Contraption Maker, 2014 von denselben Schöpfern auf Steam veröffentlicht.
- Ep. 2Mario's Picross (1995) — Picture Logic, eine 1987 geborene Form2026-06-02
Am 14. März 1995 für den Game Boy veröffentlicht, übersetzte Mario's Picross das „Bild-Logik-Puzzle“ in Spielform, das zwei Erfinder acht Jahre zuvor in Japan unabhängig voneinander geschaffen hatten. Vom Zeitungsrätsel zum Spiel und weiter zu den heutigen Steam-Nonogrammen — dies ist die Linie eines einzelnen Logikpuzzles, das fast ein halbes Jahrhundert überdauerte, ohne seinen Kern zu ändern.
- Ep. 1Sokoban (1982) — der 44 Jahre alte Prototyp der Meta-Puzzles2026-05-24
1982 veröffentlichte Hiroyuki Imabayashi von Thinking Rabbit Sokoban. Vierundvierzig Jahre später ist gehen-und-schieben noch immer das Fundament von Baba Is You und Patrick's Parabox. Die Abstammung rückwärts gelesen aus dem Kontext der Zeit.