Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory

Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory is a 1983 platformer published by Datamost. It began life on Atari 8-bit machines, and the version here is the Commodore 64 conversion. The format was fashionable at the time: a single screen packed with platforms, ladders and conveyor belts, a small robot, and a set of power pills that all have to be collected before his energy runs out.

It sits closer to Miner 2049er than to barrel-jumping arcade games, because the challenge is routing rather than reflexes. Each screen has to be walked in an order that reaches every pill without stranding you somewhere you cannot leave, since the belts only carry you one way and some routes do not come back. Enemies patrol the structure as well; they are not clever hunters, but they never stop, so you plan where you will meet them.

The real oddity is in the title. Alongside twenty-two ready-made levels the game ships with an editor that lets you build your own screens and save up to twenty-six of them. In 1983, when games arrived on tape or disk with no hint of user creation, that was an extraordinary thing to include, and it is the main reason people still bring this title up.

The game itself is fair but unforgiving. Control is precise, the jump is short, and mistakes cost a life immediately, so the early screens teach you how the robot behaves and the later ones test it. If replaying the same layout until it clicks annoys you, this will wear thin quickly. If you open the editor, you can easily spend more time with it than with the levels that came in the box.

On oldgame.cz it runs in the browser directly, with no download or setup.