2/10 – Pipe Mania
Hello and welcome. My name is Katosepe and I’ll be your host for today’s video game of the day.
Today’s game is the classic arcade puzzle game, Pipe Mania. Pipe Mania was originally developed by The Assembly Line, a British developer, for the Amiga in 1989. The distribution rights were sold to LucasArts for North American distribution where they renamed the game, Pipe Dream. Many were introduced to it through the Windows Entertainment Pack where Pipe Dream was bundled with a number of other games for the Windows operating systems.
The game is a puzzle game where players are given a grid of square tiles. Each grid has an entrance pipe and an exit pipe with blank areas in between. Players must take randomly dolled out pipe tiles to connect the two before the green sewer slime reaches the end of the pipe. Depending on how fast a player could complete this task, they are given points.
Pipe Mania was remade in 2008 by Razorworks for the Nintendo DS, PSP, Playstation 2 and PC platforms. This remake included the same basic gameplay but with an added storyline and a number of additional obstacles, backgrounds and characters to play as.
While Pipe Mania may not ring many bells for players today, most have likely played it without realizing it. A number of AAA games have used very similar concepts as minigames. Bioshock uses the Pipe Mania concept for hacking as do Saints Row 4 and Warframe.
Developed by four people, the developers from The Assembly Line have mostly stayed within the gaming industry. Adrian Stephens would go on to work on Comix Zone and Sonic and Knuckles, among other titles. Two of the men, Andy Beveridge and Martin Day formed a company that created development tools for various consoles before being acquired by Sony to work exclusively for Playstation development tools.
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