Puzzle Rally

Puzzle Rally is a small puzzle game built around a simple but clever idea: you do not directly drive the car. You rebuild the road beneath it while it moves.

The car begins in the lower left corner of each level and continues driving automatically. Your job is to rearrange the road tiles so that it can travel safely around the board, collect every colored flag and eventually return to its starting point. If the road ends underneath the car, the run is over.

Planning becomes increasingly important because the car has a limited supply of fuel. Fuel cans scattered around the board can extend the journey, while stop signs temporarily hold the car in place and give you precious time to reorganize the road ahead. The challenge is therefore part route planning and part race against the moving car: you are constantly rebuilding its path while trying to anticipate where it will go next.

The scoring system adds another layer. Flags award points, unused fuel can increase the final score, and taking additional fuel comes at a point cost, forcing the player to balance survival against efficiency.

It is a remarkably compact game, but the combination of a moving vehicle, sliding road pieces and limited fuel turns a familiar tile puzzle into something much more frantic.

Puzzle Rally was created by Alexey “Alex” Shabalin, an independent developer from Tyumen, Russia. The game itself gives him unusually clear credit: its information screen reads “Original game idea and development by Alex Shabalin” and carries a 1999 copyright. Modern databases likewise identify Shabalin as the developer and Alawar Entertainment as publisher.

The game has a particularly important place in Alawar’s early history. Alawar had only recently been founded by Alexander Lyskovsky and Sergey Zanin when Shabalin approached the young company. According to Alawar’s own later account, Shabalin told them that he had written Puzzle Rally but did not know how to sell it. Alawar agreed to distribute the game. It became the first game from an outside developer that Alawar took on, and as more independent developers subsequently approached them, the company created a dedicated publishing division. That makes Puzzle Rally more significant to Alawar’s history than its obscurity today might suggest. Alawar itself still lists Puzzle Rally among the notable games from its 1999 to 2002 beginnings, alongside Bubble Bobble Nostalgie and the Magic Ball series.

In Russia the game was also known as Автобан, or Avtoban. Some records indicate that Buka Entertainment later handled a Russian retail release.

Shabalin was not simply an anonymous Alawar employee. The surviving history specifically describes him as an outside author from Tyumen who independently brought the finished game to Alawar. He subsequently developed other puzzle games distributed by the company, including Metamorphs and later Mouse Mind: Secrets of Pharaon. Mouse Mind again credits him personally for the “Original Game Idea and Development,” suggesting that these early titles were essentially small author driven projects rather than large team productions.

That also explains why Puzzle Rally feels so different from the larger casual catalog Alawar would build later. It came from a period when a single independent programmer could make a small Windows shareware game, approach a newly formed publisher and unexpectedly become part of the foundation of that publisher’s future business.

Source: Itai’s Game Preservation Research