Arcade Puzzle

At the middle of the 19th century, a classic puzzle toy was created. A 4 by 4 grid with numbers going from 1 to 15. The objective of this puzzle was to organise them in order from left to right, starting with 1 at the top left, and ending with 15 and a blank piece at the bottom right. But in 1983, a software engineer called Andy Hertzfeld, took the decision to create the first electronic imitation of this puzzle for the original Macintosh.

Andy used the Pascal programming language as a "proof of concept and to show developers how to do it, by writing a tiny adaptor that the Pascal code linked with".

But this brought many issues, firstly, because the game was written in Pascal and not the 6800 assembly language (the preferred language and the microprocessor used in the original Macintosh), this made the puzzle over 6 kilobytes long in size. This was big enough to almost occupy all the available space in the Macintosh.

If you want to learn more about this story, take the time and visit these 2 pages:

1. The story of the "Puzzle Accessory" by its creator.
2. Early Macintosh Games from 1984 by Dog Cow published by Mac GUI.

Our game is a modern approach to this puzzle, and as a tribute for the original version for the Macintosh. Our game is minimalistic, simple and intuitive, and even has multiple ways to complete the puzzle! There's also this version that allows you to install the game to your mobile phone (or desktop) as an app and play it that way!

Click here if you want to give any feedback, suggestion or improvement for the game.