Mister Spiff III: Freeze! Mother! Freeze!

Mister Spiff III: Freeze! Mother! Freeze! is a shareware DOS platformer from 1994 by Adam Tyner, assembled in Game-Maker — a period tool that let people build games without programming. It belongs to a wave of bedroom software that would probably have vanished for good without the archivists: the Mister Spiff series was only dug up again in 2011.

The plot is textbook silliness. Spiff's companion Mister Splendid ends up behind bars on an alien planet after an innocent request for ice water offends a local dignitary. Spiff sets out to rescue him across eighteen levels grouped into themed zones — from the Blue Sky Zone to the Black Hole Zone — and his ammunition of choice is the three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk, a joke that landed perfectly in 1994.

As a game it is more interesting than its amateur origins suggest. Where the first instalment juggled several modes at once, the third is deliberately stripped down and concentrates on one thing: abstract mazes built around lock-and-key hunting and wrestling with gravity. It is less a reflex-driven jumper and more a spatial puzzle — you spend your time working out where a path even exists and in what order to take it. Controls run off the numeric keypad or a joystick, and they take a while to settle into.

The weaknesses are exactly the ones you expect: Game-Maker's engine has clumsy collision physics, the graphics are a loud jumble, and the difficulty lurches without warning. But the game has something no engine can generate — genuine, unfiltered imagination. Enemies with names like Packwood and Crazy Leg Man Gimme Candy tell you someone was creating for the fun of it, not for a market. As a window into nineties home-computer creativity it is a charming artefact.

On oldgame.cz, Spiff runs directly in your browser with nothing to install.