Philippe Lesire used to own a Commodore 64 and draw on it, or rather for it. He drew on cross-rule paper, translated the pictures to binary, and stored them into memory with BASIC's POKE and DATA commands. Later he pushed pixels in Deluxe Paint 2, first on an Amiga, then on a PC. One of his hobbies is re-designing title screens of his favorite C64 games, for example Krakout. You could say that Philippe Lesire knows the guts of computer graphics. In his version of Atomic, this is breathtakingly evident.

As a game, Atomic is simply a remake of Thalion's game of the same name. It is an awfully hard puzzle game in the vein of Soko-ban: You have to arrange the atoms to the molecule depicted on the left. You can move the atoms at will, but they will only stop when they hit something. To make things even more difficult, the valances point into a fixed direction. If, for example, in the first level you have to assemble a water molecule, than you have one left and one right hydrogen atom. You start with simple things like water or methane and move on to more complex molecules.

Philippe Lesire's game is a faithful remake. The logo is the same, the puzzles are the same, there's a portrait of Albert Einstein on the loading screen. What makes it really remarkable is that he did all this in 16 colors, not just any 16 colors, but the standard Windows palette.

If you have ever used Windows with a VGA screen in the 90s, and maybe doodled around in Paintbrush, you know the standard palette. It is not exactly an artists dream. It contains the eight most basic computer colors, those that you get when red, green and blue are either completely off or at full brightness, then adds seven half-bright colors, and finally throws in silver, which is all three colors at three quarters of their brightness. Why they used this garish, Spectrum-like palette and instead of the standard IBM colors, I'll never understand.

The palette wasn't so bad if what you were going for were simple, clean graphics. Take, for example, YATC, or the Windows version of Pipe Dream. But you soon ran into problems when you wanted something more complex. The pictures for the Jigsaw Puzzle in the Entertainment Pack looked crap. Epyx' Getaway Entertainment 6Pack (see Stuffin the Briefcase as an example) could run in the standard palette, but definitely looked better on a 256-color desktop where it could pick its own colors.

Yet Philippe Lesire's Atomic looks a lot better than the Amiga original!

And why did he create a Windows 3.1 game in 2000? Actually, he didn't. He wrote Atomic in 1993, it was his first Windows program, but didn't release it back then. 1999 he dug it out again and fixed some bugs. The 2000 version contains some further updates. Since this is the version you will find, and the date is prominently displayed on the title screen, I have listed it under the year 2000 to avoid confusion.

Download Atomic for Windows (198kB)

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