PushPush News

Update Aug 18, 2007

After about 5 years, we finally made some updates to the site, and the game. Most importantly, there is now a simple drag 'n drop editor to create new levels! We talked about this years ago, but nothing ever came of it. Now it's possible to create as many new levels as we like, and you can register and create new levels also.

Updates:

  • No more cache problems! Selecting any level correctly loads that level.

  • New levels! These were created by us or other users. Available on the Select page.

  • Push Editor! Check it out by clicking the "Create" link above.

I would tell you what other things we have planned to fix, but it may be another 5 years before it happens, so I'll just update this page (maybe in another 5 years?).

Fun facts, links, and gossip

A quick search on Google will find a variety of games and things called PushPush.

In addition to a famous theater group in Atlanta and a whole bunch of cats named after us (??) there also seems to be a Japanese girl pop band. Maybe we can get them to write our soundtracks.

PushPush was inspired by an Amiga game I enjoyed called Roll Out, published in 1989. RollOut had lots of arcade-style things going on in it. I thought it would be fun to rewrite the basic game strictly as a puzzle. The result was PushPush for Macintosh, written by us, Alan Rogers and Charles Mead, the authors of the Flash version on this site. The original is so well written it will still run today without a glitch on the latest MacOS. On the latest iMacs, things move SO FAST you can't even see them moving across the screen. Who knew computers would be this fast and the game would still be around now?

If you own a Macintosh, please take a look at the original - you can get a copy here. We got a page on a European site called Euregio too.

There's a computer science problem that has been named after PushPush. Joseph O'Rourke, Martin Demain and Erik Demain published some academic papers on the complexity of the game. Erik won a MacArthur award and was profiled in WIRED (Dec. 03). Joseph teaches computer science at Smith College. Erik is assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He created a version of PushPush for scientific research and was nice enough to refer to us on his web page. We're trying to recruit him. We think he could design some really wicked levels.

Hey, Erik - did we mention you would be glorified forever with your very own series called "Erik's Evil Adventures"?

We also inspired several imitators, who obviously thought we had just gone away after all these years.They even stole the name of our game! Here are a few of them:

  • PushPush 1 - Another freeware game. This version was created by Luigi Recanatese. He lives in Italy. It's the same name, but he added some interesting twists. There are downloadable versions for PC and Mac.

  • PushPush 2 - An Amiga version. I havent seen the game, but we approve. We both owned Amigas. ;-)