Chuck Sommerville

Revision as of 01:14, 6 July 2019 by Ncrecc (talk | contribs)

Chuck Sommerville is the original creator of Chip's Challenge, as well as the designer of roughly one-third of the levels of the original set. He worked for 10 months on the original game with his crew of programmers and level designers, and Epyx, the company he worked for at the time, published the game as a launch title for the new Atari Lynx console in 1989.

Chuck by a computer, with Lesson 4 displayed.

In 1999, he began to work on an official sequel, Chip's Challenge 2, but was unfortunately not able to release it due to legal issues with Bridgestone Multimedia, the new company who bought the rights to Chip's Challenge. He would not be able to release it until 2015, 13 years after the game's completion.

During this period of 13 years, Chuck took a leaf from Brian Raiter's book and began to develop the Tile World equivalent to CC2: Puzzle Studio. Puzzle Studio was quite a hot discussion topic back when it was being actively developed, with its own Yahoo! group and internet forum as well as its own section on Chip's Portal, now known as CCZone. However, this section on CCZone no longer exists, and the Yahoo! group and forum have since been taken down in favor of the development of Chuck's Challenge 3D, Chuck's official clone of CC featuring almost all the elements from Chip's Challenge along with a few new elements seen in CC2, as well as a few elements not seen in either of the two games. Chuck's Challenge was originally released for mobile devices in 2013, but Chuck's Challenge 3D was released on Steam in 2014 for around $4.

Allack, Chuck's partner in business, has stated in early 2019 on the Chip's Challenge Discord server that Puzzle Studio will be used in the development of Chip's Challenge 3, and Chuck's son will be responsible for the coding of whatever new tiles will be added to the game. Unfortunately, little other info about this supposed CC3 is currently known.

Levels in official packs

CC1

Exactly which levels in CC1 were designed by Chuck are not remembered; just that he designed "about a third" of the original 148, which is roughly 49. The following 11 levels only include what he is known to have designed.

# Name
1 Lesson 1
2 Lesson 2
3 Lesson 3
4 Lesson 4
5 Lesson 5
6 Lesson 6
7 Lesson 7
8 Lesson 8
9 Nuts and Bolts
33 On the Rocks
140 Icedeath

CC2

# Name
1 Lesson 1
7 Turtle Blocks
9 Lesson 2
19 Lesson 3
29 Lesson 4
30 Inlay
38 Quick Time
39 Quick Time II
40 Quick Time III
50 Lesson 5
60 Lesson 6
68 Lights Out
70 Lesson 7
99 Binary
100 Crazy
101 Tank Blocker
104 Pieces of Eight
150 Rush
154 Pigeon Holes
156 In the Slime
184 Gears
197 Blockcombo 4
200 Crazy II