Pipe Dream - Lucasfilm Games - 1989 - First time Playing?: Yes!

I figured I wouldn’t have much to say about Pipe Dream. There’s a lot of Pipe Dream inspired or Pipe Dream adjacent games on Mac OS, several of which are well loved such as Aqua Blooper Piper and Troubled Souls, so having a look at Pipe Dream was more of a formality to ensure I had covered the origin point before I go reviewing its adaptations and derivatives. I was intending to combine all three of those mentioned games into a single page of three mini-reviews, but here I am, giving Pipe Dream a full review after getting surprisingly into it. I’d never actually played Pipe Dream. I haven’t even played BioShock yet, which adapts Pipe Dream for its hacking minigame and is likely how most people today know of the game. Either way, I figured that it would simply be something I’d play for a few minutes and then move on, but then I spent an entire day playing it. Oops.

Just by looking at the screenshots you’ve probably got the general idea of how the game works, it’s very easy to understand. Well, okay, except for the fact that the goop filling the pipes is apparently called “flooz”, you’d probably need the manual for that bit of context. Your objective is to build a pipeline that contains the flooz flowing out of the starting pipe for as long as possible by connecting pipe pieces together. Clicking on an empty tile on the play field will place the pipe segment at the bottom of the stack on the left side of the screen on that tile. At the top right of the screen the “dist.” counter keeps track of how much distance the flooz needs to travel in order to clear the level, counting down by 1 every time the flooz travels once tile of distance. The level ends when the flooz either overflows out of an open pipe or hits a wall, at which point you'll either go to the next level if you hit the distance requirement for that level, or you game over and then can enter your name into the high score table on the title sc-

O-oh. Okay, I probably should have expected compatibility issues, as I’m trying to run a game from 1989 on a computer and operating system from 2001. Pipe Dream mostly works on Mac OS 9.2.2, with the exception being that it crashes any time you game over and get a high score. The sensible thing at this point would be to load the game up in an emulator, but I already used Mini vMac for the last two Mac reviews I did and I feel like I’m stretching the “all reviews on original hardware” claim every time I resort to that. RIP to all of my high scores, we’ll ride or die Mac OS 9 for this one.

It’s a shame nonetheless, as the scoring mechanics of Pipe Dream are solid and have some real depth to them. The primary way of earning points is simply by having the flooz travel the furthest possible distance, though certain actions such as having the flooz flow cross over itself or having it flow into the bonus pipes will earn you extra points. The scoring mechanics also encourage a lot of planning ahead and not wasting spare pipe parts. While I was playing I had a bad tendency to just place pipes I couldn't immediately see a usage for off to the side of the play field, with the intention of discarding pipe parts until I get the specific part that I wanted. This is penalised however, as every pipe part on the play field that doesn't have flooz flowing through it by the end of the level will deduct 100 points from your score.

Even if just aiming to get to the next level however, such strategies are still very helpful. The plus-shaped pipe parts that the flooz can cross over twice help a ton as they cover twice the distance while also covering less of the playfield. Meanwhile, building another pipeline further ahead out of spare pipe parts that your current flooz-filled pipeline can connect to later will naturally keep the flooz contained for far longer than just adding on single new usable pieces onto the end of your current pipeline with no goal beyond that. Regardless, the pacing of Pipe Dream is always frantic and panicky. You have very little time to build a pipeline before the flooz starts flowing, and once it is flowing it’s never slowing down. As a result, as should be the case with all puzzle games in my mind, it's immensely satisfying in a stim kind of way when you get the hang of all of these mechanics, manage the pressure and create a massive screen-filling pipeline.

Speaking of stims, the sound design. I can understand why people would find it annoying, but I absolutely adore it. Other than the title theme and the jingles at the start of every level, the only music here if it can be called that is an extremely short and suspenseful loop that accompanies the flooz pouring out from the starting point. It brings to mind the drowning music from Sonic the Hedgehog in how it seems designed intentionally to be a bit panic inducing and stressful, and the longer the level goes on and the further the flooz travels the more fast and high pitched the loop becomes. What I love about the sound design is how the reaction it gets out of the player changes the longer that they play the game and get better at it. It's anxiety incarnate at first, but once you're more used to the game mechanics and more regularly building massive pipelines, hearing that loop go on even longer and get higher and higher pitched gives the player some really satisfying audio feedback. The higher you hear the music go, the better you know you're doing at the game. It's almost akin to filling up a glass of water and how you can hear the sound of the flow of water get higher pitched the closer the glass gets to being filled. Once you know that sound you can easily fill a glass of water without even looking at it just by going off those sounds, and hearing the pitch go higher in Pipe Dream is similarly satisfying to me.

I was expecting that every level of Pipe Dream would likely be the same, just an empty grid to build a pipeline in with the only difference being that the flooz would move faster and you'd need to build longer pipes to win. In actuality, there's a bit more going on here that kept me glued to the screen to see how the game would further evolve. As you progress through the levels the game will gradually introduce more and more mechanics, such as passages on the edge of the screen which wrap around to the other side of the play field, one-way pipes that flooz can only flow through in one direction, obstacles and pipes already present on the play field and circular reservoirs that delay the flow of flooz if you lead your pipes through them, due to how long the reservoirs take to fill up. Things get the trickiest when the end pipes are introduced. On any level which has an end pipe in it, simply making a long enough pipe isn’t enough, it also needs to connect to the end pipe or else you’ll lose the stage. The graphical tilesets used also change every four levels, giving more of a sense of progression. Every four levels you also get a bonus minigame which I am absolutely rubbish at. This minigame has you drop pipe parts from the top of the screen like a falling block puzzle game in order to try and build a pipeline. This is purely for getting extra points, so no matter how badly you do in this minigame you'll still be able to progress.

As a result of these new mechanics, I got determined to try and beat Pipe Dream, in order to see everything it had to offer. In actuality, I don’t think you can beat Pipe Dream. Every four levels you get a password save that allows you to restart from that level after you get a game over, but after level 32 the game stops giving passwords and seems to keep going on endlessly from that point forward. At that point every mechanic in the game has been introduced however, so I guess that beating level 32 can be considered beating it? I only made it as far as level 34 in my attempts.

When you’re done with that however, there’s also expert mode to try out. This isn’t necessarily a harder difficulty level like I initially thought, but instead an alternate game mode. In expert mode there are instead two stacks of pipe parts on the left side of the screen for you to place parts from on the playfield, with the player being able to choose which stack they’re placing pipes from using the space bar. It takes some getting used to and it makes me wish the game had support for two-button computer mice, as simply right clicking to place the parts from the second stack would be a lot less cumbersome than selecting with the space bar, but once you get a feel for it, it opens up even more options for your pipeline building which allows for even more strategising.

So, how’s the Mac port? Well, some background first. Pipe Dream could be argued to be something of a derivative of itself. Originally the game was called Pipe Mania and was released for the Amiga, but once Lucasfilm Games bought the rights and started porting it to everything with a CPU, the game was renamed to Pipe Dream. Of the computer versions of Pipe Dream, the Amiga version is by far the best sounding and best looking, with a lot of visual details that were lost in the other ports such as the little cartoon plumber in the bottom left of the screen or the fish present in some of the later levels. The DOS version does an admirable job adapting the Amiga visuals, but the sound is entirely scrapped and redone in PC Speaker style, resulting in the game sounding like Duke Nukem 1. The Windows 3.x version meanwhile is stripped back as far as you possibly could strip it while still calling it Pipe Dream, with the most basic and minimalist graphics and no sound at all. The Mac version meanwhile is more or less in between the Windows and Amiga versions in terms of content. The Mac version for instance adapts all of the music of the Amiga original, even if it sounds far crunchier on Mac, and also like the Amiga version it has multiple graphical tilesets which the game cycles through as you progress through more levels, although the more extravagant extra details of the Amiga version like the aforementioned cartoon plumber and fish are not present. While still more detailed than the Windows version, it is slightly odd how minimalist the Mac version is visually. The colour palette brings to mind CGA DOS games with the heavy usage of pink and blue.

So, the Amiga version is the best, right? I'm actually not sure about that. With longer load times and a copy protection system requiring you to get the manual out to find codes that allow you to play the game, as well as the game only being playable in full screen, the Amiga version is slower to start, which limits the quick and easy pick-up-and-play quality of the game. Version 1.3 of Pipe Dream on Mac has no copy protection and is clearly designed with the intention of making the game into something of a quick coffee break kind of game, akin to Minesweeper or Solitaire, made even more clear by the presence of a Boss Key, a keystroke that instantly replaces the game window with a fake spreadsheet, in case you want to play the game at your office job and you need to quickly make your computer look like you're doing hard work when your boss walks by (just hope they don’t notice that the spreadsheet is filled with Lucasfilm Games product placement). Aside from being windowed and quick to start up, there's also a desktop accessory version of the game, which runs in a smaller monochrome window so you can more easily multitask, using other applications like office software, web browsers or IRC clients while playing Pipe Dream. Qualms of authenticity to the presentation of the Amiga original aside, this more easily accessible time killer form of Pipe Dream feels like what the game was always going to be best suited as. Then again, in 2025 most people don't have vintage Macs set up that they regularly use for extended periods, so that easily accessible perk is a little lost now.

Pipe Dream may be small scale in its scope, but it's damn addicting and has some substance beneath its casual-friendly mechanics. The Mac version is not going to offer enough difference to the other ports to justify going to the extra effort of getting a vintage Mac or an emulator set up, but remains a solid version if classic Macs are your thing. Easily recommended checking out in some form or another.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 19th June 2025