If you’re presently fighting the progressive (and irreversible) onslaught of greying hair, a rounded paunch, or a balding pate, then it’s more than likely that Commodore 64 classic Impossible Mission is a game that you not only know, but also lovingly recall with pangs of fond 1980’s remembrance. Well, dear ‘old-school’ gamer, reminisce no more, because Impossible Mission is coming to the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii.

More pointedly, videogame publisher System 3, best known for Guilty Gear, Last Ninja, Crisis Beat, and Silent Bomber, has this week announced that it is to bring a specially enhanced version of the classic Epyx Commodore 64 title Impossible Mission to the market-leading Nintendo DS handheld console and also the newly launched Nintendo Wii home console – as well as PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable.

The announcement ties in with it being a staggering twenty-five years since the release of the original game, when Impossible Mission was lauded as the first game to integrate real synthesized speech into its gameplay, which, by today’s standards, was an incredible feat of 8-bit development engineering. Yet, System 3 has unveiled that the new Impossible Mission will benefit from modernisation through brand new graphics and sound to guarantee that the game is set to wow a brand new generation of game players.

Impossible Mission sees the player stepping into the shoes of a dedicated secret agent who embarks on an assignment to foil the nefarious plans of the evil – and amusingly named –Professor Elvin Atombender who’s been fiddling naughtily with the country’s NSC (National Security Computer) system. Players are tasked with finding a way into Atombender’s base of operations while striving to gather parts of the system’s password and avoiding the deadly attentions of the professor’s robotic guards – and all against the relentless ticking of the clock.

Although Impossible Mission has been re-written and re-built from scratch for modern hardware, with new graphics, 3D objects and items, new sound effects, and a new musical soundtrack, System 3 is keen to point out that the revamped title will remain impressively faithful to the gameplay evident in the classic original – while the layout within the game will change every time a new game is started!

“We’ve worked hard to bring Impossible Mission up-to-date whilst keeping the original gameplay that made the game such a hit in the eighties”,

commented System 3’s CEO, Mark Cale,

“We’re particularly pleased with the handheld versions, which will ensure this historic game can be enjoyed by a completely new generation of gamers”.

The new Impossible Mission will also offer players the choice between three central characters, and also a newly implemented tutorial mode too. Furthermore, three core game modes will exist to entice players, those being: New, Original, and a Hybrid mode that mixes the original title’s gameplay with the updated version’s aesthetics.

Existing as a part of the growing Epyx back catalogue, Impossible Mission will arrive in the second quarter of 2007.