Coin Planets: a nine-planet platform game

The listing set out the shape of the game in detail. Forty-five levels are spread across nine planets, each planet ending in its own boss, and the levels can be taken in any order rather than in sequence — an unusual concession for a platform game of the period, and one that tells you the design was built around individual level puzzles rather than a difficulty curve. A high score table recorded results, and asteroid-surfing bonus rounds broke the platform sections up with shooting.

The character had appeared before. The description introduces him as returning in a new adventure, which places this in the middle of a small series rather than at its start, and the same site carried the earlier game at its own separate address. That matters for an audit: a series is more likely than a single title to leave surrounding material — a demo, a patch, a support page — and all of it depended on the same publisher.

The commercial arrangement is recorded too, and it is the arrangement that explains the disappearance. A free demo established interest, the full game cost 19.95 dollars, and the purchase carried a sixty-day money-back guarantee. Nothing in that chain involves a shop: the buyer dealt with the publisher directly, so when the publisher stopped answering there was no third party left holding a copy.

The movement verbs in the description are worth noting, because they are not the usual three. Running and jumping are what a platform game of this period assumed, but teleporting and surfing were listed alongside them, which means two of the four ways of getting around were not standard platform mechanics at all. Combined with levels that can be taken in any order, this reads as a design built out of individual set pieces rather than one continuous skill test.

The technical requirements date the release precisely without a release date being given. Windows 95 through XP, a 400 MHz processor and joystick or gamepad support describe a game built for a machine of roughly 2000 to 2005, and the page itself was published in December 2005 — the first year this site covered anything, when its entries were shorter than the ones it wrote later.

Established: the design, the level and boss counts, the level-select structure, the bonus rounds, the price, the guarantee, the platform requirements, and the date this site covered it. Unestablished on every count of provenance: no publisher, no author, no year, no surviving route to a copy. The gap is a clean example of the pattern this archive keeps finding — a game can be documented in full and still be unobtainable, because what goes missing is the organisation, not the description.