Emerald Mine II

Emerald Mine II was written in 1988 by the German company Kingsoft and is the second entry in what became one of the most successful European takes on Boulder Dash. The premise will be familiar: you dig tunnels through soil, collect emeralds until you have enough to open the exit, and try not to end up under a falling boulder.

What Kingsoft added to that template is where the interest lies. There are locked doors and keys for them, bombs, dynamite you set off yourself, extra breeds of enemy, and nuts — which look like ordinary rocks until a boulder cracks one open and leaves an emerald behind. That turns a purely spatial puzzle into one where you also plan which stones to spend and in what order.

The headline addition in the second game is the level editor. That sounds like a bonus feature, but for this family of games it was decisive. The editor turned Emerald Mine from a game into a format: an enormous body of community-made levels grew up around the series, and plenty of people remember the title through mines they built themselves or got from a friend rather than through the ones on the disk.

It plays slowly and rewards a pencil. You need to read a level before taking your first step, because one boulder dropped in the wrong place seals a route permanently and leaves you with nothing but a restart. Anyone who hates repeating the same thirty seconds will suffer here, and the game offers no comfort — it explains nothing, hints at nothing, it just hands you a layout and lets you wreck it. If you like a puzzle where mistakes are punished instantly and fairly, there are dozens of hours in this.

Emerald Mine II runs on oldgame.cz straight in the browser, with no emulator to install.