Repton 3 for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron

The rules are simple enough to state in a sentence and hard enough to fill a decade. Repton digs through earth, collects diamonds and reaches the exit. Boulders sit in the earth and fall when the ground beneath them is removed. Nothing in the level moves unless the player moves first, so every failure is a planning failure rather than a reaction failure — the screen is a logic problem that happens to be drawn as a cave.

What separated the third game from the first two was the editor. Superior Software shipped the tools used to build the levels alongside the levels themselves, which turned buyers into authors. Level packs circulated on cassette, then on disc, then on the early web, and they have not stopped: the format outlived the machine it was written for because the people who liked it could keep feeding it.

On the Electron the game runs in a graphics mode that holds the processor off the bus, so it is perceptibly slower than the same code on a BBC Micro. Players who learned the levels on one machine and then moved to the other tend to describe the difference as the timing feeling wrong rather than the game feeling slow, which is a fair description of what memory contention does to a fixed-step puzzle.

How it was sold matters to how it survived. Cassette and disc releases put a physical copy in a buyer's hands, and a physical copy does not stop existing when a company does. The modern conversions are downloads sold by a trading company, which is a different kind of durability — convenient while the company is there, and dependent on it. This entry is one of very few here where both forms of durability apply at once.

Distribution shaped the record as much as the design did. A cassette or disc release put a physical artefact into a buyer's hands, and physical artefacts are indifferent to whether the publisher still exists. That is why the entries on this site with the fullest records are the oldest ones, and why a 1986 puzzle game is easier to establish facts about than a game sold as a download in 2008.

What the record supports here is unusually broad: the machines, the year, the publisher, the presence of the level editor, and a current commercial status confirmed against the publisher's own site. What it does not support is a sales figure or a claim about how many user-made levels exist, both of which circulate widely and neither of which this archive can check.