The Last Few Chips

Foreword Commentary

This is an interesting book for me to write, and I think that as far as that statement goes, this will be a challenging book for me as well. In it, I will be detailing the plot and adding commentary to the levels I have made for Chip's Challenge and related games. I hope that as a whole, this book will be interesting to those who do not know my levels or the game at all as well. But let me rewind a bit to provide a little bit of context.

As early as 2004 (and perhaps earlier), I have played Chip's Challenge, a sokoban puzzle game originally released for the Atari Lynx in 1989. I might have found it on my elementary school's computers. When I was unable to use the computer lab, I'd spend my time during lunches on the computers in the library trying to pass whichever level I happened to be stuck on.

I had a copy of the game at my home, too, though it was less of a focus there unless I was stuck on a particular level and needed to spend hours that night trying to pass it. It was an addiction for me. I wanted to play more levels, and while I was quite unskilled, I always wanted to solve one more puzzle. One time, I had been stuck on a particular level for months, and I put it out to my fellow students that if any of them could solve it, I would invite them to my house to help me solve it. It got me bad.

I believe that it was in 2005 that I began to look up solutions online for levels that stymied me. As with many community members, this is how I found the community. There was a particular website that listed links to various interesting community members—from those seeking to solve the levels with the maximum number of points to those who wanted to make their own levels. I was in heaven.

The number of fan-made levelsets for this game is fairly mind-boggling. For those who don't know, there are thousands of levelsets, with anywhere between 5-200 levels in each set. Every few years, the community votes on the best 149 levels to create a semi-official levelset to further the efforts of the community. Well, I decided that I should try to make my own levels. And I thought that they were great.

In 2006, my plans for The Last Few Chips were born. I was growing close to having 149 levels, a sort of loose requisite for a "full" levelset—based on that being how many levels were in the version of the game released on the Windows Entertainment Pack floppy diskettes in the early 1990s.

Over the years, I continued to make levels. To date, I've made almost 600 levels spanning about 10 levelsets, and one of my levels was even voted into one of the fan-produced levelsets. I participated in the community by helping it move out of the message-board era and into the forum era of the Internet, and have been a major piece of an online clone of the game.

I wrote a plot to accompany my levelset series, and looking back on it, it's about as thought-through as the actual levels were. The levels and the plot don't particularly match up. This book hopes to rewrite the plot while staying true to its major events and create a more cohesive look for The Last Few Chips as a project.

Each one of those 600 levels is going to have its own short chapter in this book so as to help clarify a muddled plot outline. With each break in levelsets, I plan to speak a little on the origin and circumstances surrounding what went into those levelsets. Please, leave comments on things if you would like me to expand my explanations.