Puzzle Mania is a very early development by Karl Hörnell in 1984, way before his Player Software days. The game is a simple puzzle shuffle game and was created in BASIC.
The title was found and preserved by Hedning and Zyron of Genesis Project and released in August 2023 (it isn’t yet known where/how it was found). When Hedning asked Karl about the game, he responded:
“I remember the game itself, but not much of the context. It was written shortly after my C64 had been hardware modified with Swedish characters, so that square brackets and pound symbol became ÅÄÖ. To avoid designing my own letters but still get something that looks more fun than the default set, I had the game at startup do an or operation with each byte shifted one position to the right, so that the characters became ‘bold’. But since the values are not saved but taken from the machine the game is running on, I get a “£” in my name in these screenshots.
I didn’t see it as a potential problem at the time, because I didn’t think the game would run on someone else’s computer.”
So here it is for you to enjoy, and to experience a piece of history.
Contributions: Karl Hörnell, Hedning, Zyron
