Realm Of Impossibility is an arcade style run-and-avoid game that was published by Electronic Arts in 1984 and released for the Commodore 64, Apple // and Atari's 8-bit line of computers. Sporting simplistic character/enemy sprites and animation, the main graphical emphasis in the game was placed on the jaw-dropping (for the time) dungeon scenery, utilizing a simple 3/4 top-down three-dimensional view and integrating Escher-eqsue patterns into the levels' platforms.

The concept of the game is simple: run through the level, grab the treasure at the end, and escape back to the level's entrance. Complicating the task are four monsters.



Zombies frantically skitter around back and forth toward your general direction. Snakes steadily circle around closer and closer to you. Spiders tend to stay dormant and hop in quick bursts toward you. Orbs randomly bounce around until sighting you, at which point they charge forward. All enemies drain your hit points (life force) continually when they touch you, so avoiding them is key. To assist you in avoiding the monsters, you can drop an infinite number of crosses on the ground which act as temporary barriers to the monsters (and you, if you become careless in your placement of them). After a set time, the crosses disappear one by one.

Scattered around the levels are magic scrolls which can either restore some hit points or give you one of three spells. The Freeze spell makes all enemies on the screen stop moving, the Confuse spell makes the monsters stop following you and run around aimlessly and the Protect spell allows you invulnerability. All spells last approximately four seconds.

Moving vertically is much slower than moving horizontally in this game. That, coupled with the difficulty as a result in scaling the many ladders in the levels, increases the challenge quite a bit. The game designer understood this a bit too well, as many of the enemies are initially positioned at the bottom of (or worse, on) a ladder that you have no choice but to climb down to proceed deeper into the level.

The dungeons range in difficulty from laughably easy to frustratingly difficult. Upon completing a dungeon, you acquire a couple dozen hit points and you're sent back to the dungeon menu to choose the next level you wish to play through. Wise choices in the order you play the levels are a must as saving the most difficult ones for last will typically result in a dead character.

Realm Of Impossibility is based on and contains all seven levels of Mike Edwards' 1983 game, Zombies. The differences in play between the two games is negligible, most centering around enemy movement and hit point drain. The largest difference between the two is really only the title screen music, with Realm's being bouncy and catchy and Zombies' being nearly unlistenable.

For anybody interested, I had the Atari 800XL version back in 1989 and making this website was a wonderful way to kill two afternoons.

Blak Playg, 5/14/2004.