IMP (ImPick)
A downloadable game for Windows
IMP is a 2001 fighting game by IdolFX.
It was originally released on 50 (!) separate discs, each containing one (1) character. In 2025, Jeff (that's me) made a video about IMP.
The page you are currently visiting contains a slightly janky-but-functional shareware build of the game, which was put together in 2025 by Jeffiot and Nick Glenn from Playable Workshop, with permission from the original IdolFX devs.
This build of the game is the first time that all 50 characters are included with the game, and the first time anyone has been able to (legally) actually play with every single character, without having to track down all 50 discs.
see jeffs video about IMP here:
Instructions:
How to download
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Download the
.rarfile -
Extract it
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Run the
.exe
You’ll then choose between the web version or the desktop version.
Web version instructions
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Scan the QR code with your phone
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Pick your fighter on your phone
Launch the game from your phone
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Start playing on your PC
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Switch characters from your phone whenever needed
Desktop version instructions
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Pick your character from the dropdown menu
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launch the game, pick your arena,
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when it shows your currently picked character, tab out, change to your second character, and tab back in
(Yes, it’s clunky. Welcome to IMP.)
League Mode
League mode works in both versions. Behind the scenes, it mounts an .iso to your PC to trick it into thinking there's a physical game disc inserted.
Once that .ISO has loaded (give it somewhere between 10 seconds and 1 minute after clicking the league mode-button), pick your character, set up your league and when it prompts you to insert your imp disk, switch character before clicking okay for each character you want to enter. it'll make sense.
Tutorial Video
Troubleshooting
if the game does not start, or runs the launcher but not the actual game, go into the folder impdata and launch imp.exe directly once, making sure that you allow it to run through your firewall. see timestamp 0:07 in the tutorial video above for a step-by-step.
Other
The game is free. Any donations will go toward IMP-related endeavors by Jeff.
More info may end up here later as things evolve.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
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Awesome work with this! Any chance of making the ImPick code open source for contributions and/or linux support?
The goty nominees are lucky that this wasn't published earlier
The implaunch.exe and Imp.exe work, but impick itself gives a Python DLL error. And when I start the game itself, I think it checks for a disk (that I obviously don't have) so it freezes up and I had to close it.
I just watched the documentary about the video, shame the guy who had the concept didn't want to be interviewed, reminds me of Monster Rancher on PS1.
Jeffiot probably singlehandedly raising the value of every Imp BUTTGOD disc lol
I played this before after I found all fifty discs on an Internet Archive collection. You've done a great service by taking all of these seperate discs and putting them into one big thing. Now I don't need to have all burned discs in order to play. It's now a good deal more simple.
I was able to get the base game working on linux, but not ImPick. Start implauncher.exe with a recent version of proton, it runs fullscreen with no graphics issues I've seen (wine 10.19 had some window size and rendering order problems). You'll have to manually create the `data/ply` folder and copy character data into it, otherwise works great.
I wasn't able to get ImPick running under wine/proton, but it might work with an altered windows build, or linux build which has you launch the game yourself through steam/lutris/whatever and just manages character data.
Boring technical stuff:
ImPick.exe fails to start because of a problem loading the python314.dll. I'm able to run a very basic python 3.14 script with wine 10.19. PyInstaller uses upx if it's available on windows but disables it on linux, it's possible that running PyInstaller with
--noupxor an older python version fixes things, but I haven't made a minimal PyInstaller program on windows with 3.14 to test.Thanks for all your work on researching and preserving this!
Hello! Thank you for your hard work in tracking down all 50 imps!
I reverse engineer old obscure games as a hobby, and my friend and I have made a few discoveries (will edit as I learn more):
config.inifile, and it just works. No having to deal with your windows getting shuffled around.language="swedish"or whatever. If left blank (""), it will fall back to checking the keyboard layout you’re using, and default to English if it doesn’t find anything it supports. The following are supported:Did you make any progress on custom imps/stages?
Looking at how this works I wonder if all the data for the character is in that PLY folder, to the point that they could have added new characters post release.
If that's true then custom characters could be made after reversing the related game file formats.
It might also be possible to make a machine code patch of some kind to allow select of the character in game, like popping up an injected UI for selection when it tries to read the PLY folder and rerouting it to a new location based on what is selected.
You can also easily make "skins" if you are too lazy to make a fully custom character. I opened Slink's PLY folder and loaded his IMP.JPG in paint. Then I could just draw a smiley face on him or paste pictures straight in.
Thank you for producing this obvious labor of love -- very entertaining video and interesting bit of software history preserved for the ages.
I'm getting virus errors (was able to launch it for a moment and get 2 different fighters, but after it crashed and any time i try to re-extract it gives me virus errors
I'm not necessarily into fighting games all that much, but after watching the video I'm really excited to get a few friends to play with me over parsec! BUTTGOD definitely also did some heavy lifting.
Jeff this is absolutely incredible. After watching the video, I wanted to play with my son really bad and was bummed that I was going to go and have to track down random CDs. Huge shout out to you and the Idol FX team for making this possible!