Hiatus

UPDATE 2 (June 17) Yeah. It's not March 23, is it? I ended up taking longer than expected to focus on other projects that needed my attention. That will probably happen again: I write Run and Jump for fun, so when deadlines loom, it's the first to be put on the back burner, unfortunately. I'm caught up, though, so the blog will return this Friday; Patreon subscribers can read the new review now.

UPDATE (March 9): What started as a one-week hiatus is being extended a bit longer. I'm working on several long-form features for my main freelance client, and need to devote time and energy to those. I'll be back the week of March 23. See you then!

Original Post:

Hi, all,

I traveled to a friend's wedding last week, and have a lot on my plate now that I'm home. Run and Jump will return with game #7 next week. See you then!

~David

Game #6: Canyon Climber (1982)

Background

• Developer: Tim Ferris
• Publisher: Datasoft
• Debut: 1982
• Platform: TRS-80 (Model-I)
• Ports: Apple II, Atari 8-bit PC, PC-6001

Trash ‘70s

So far, our trek through the primordial ooze of platform games has taken us through arcades, considered dens of iniquity by parents and educators in the early 1980s. A different type of gaming technology, the personal computer, had emerged a few years earlier. Parents were less fussed over their kids whiling away time on the computer, and that came down to marketing.

Manufacturers billed computers as productivity machines. Filling out spreadsheets, balancing your checkbook, writing memos and reports--these and other constructive tasks were the raison d'etre for the PC. Of course, not just anyone could afford a computer. Just because computers had shrunk from gymnasium-consuming behemoths to desktop-sized boxes didn't mean most families could afford them. 

Then there was the problem of accessibility. The earliest PCs were sold as do-it-yourself kits composed of circuit boards and wires. We were still far out from the days when one could pop into an electronics store, buy a computer off the shelf, take it home, and plug and play. The dawn of readymade computers occurred in 1977, with the arrival of the holy "Trinity" of PCs.

Venerable publication Byte magazine christened the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 Model I the "Trinity" of personal computing, and with good cause. All three arrived in stores in '77. All three came in pre-built forms, though you could purchase kits if you were savvy enough to piece them together yourself. Most importantly, all three were relatively affordable.

The Commodore PET, short for Personal Electronic Transactor, debuted in January '77, designating it the leader of the Trinity. For only $795, customers got a 1-megahertz (MHz) processor, between 4 and 96 kilobytes (K) of memory, and a cassette tape deck for storage. Another crucial inclusion was Commodore BASIC 1.0, a programming language one could use to write one's own software. This was important because PC software was not available in stores right away. If you wanted to play a game or balance your checkbook, you needed to write the code to accomplish those ends yourself.

Apple delivered the Apple II that June. The priciest of the Trinity, it ran $1,298 (or $5,476 in 2019 dollars) but included 4K of RAM and a processor that clocked just over 1 MHz. What made the Apple II special was the empty bays, or ports, under its hood. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a hacker at heart. He predicted that savvy users would want to expand the capabilities of their Apple II over time, so he fitted the motherboard with slots where users could install extra peripherals such as cards to connect printers and modems, as well as additional RAM to run more demanding software.

Bringing up the rear was the TRS-80, retroactively named the TRS-80 Model I after its maker, Tandy RadioShack, released upgraded models to keep up with Commodore and Apple. The comparatively low price of $599 got you a 1.774 MHz processor and 4K of RAM. 

A discussion of the early history of PCs is relevant to our examination of platformers. Arcade games were more advanced: better graphics, better sound, better controls. That's great, but few people could afford to pay thousands of dollars for an arcade cabinet that only played a single game, and fewer had the technical skill to crack open the cabinet and swap out the circuits that contained game code if they wanted to play something else.

Though none of the "Trinity" were billed as gaming devices, they could be; all one needed was a little bit of cash, the patience to learn a programming language, and an idea for a game--or, better yet, a proven idea that one could replicate. Although the Apple II became the most successful of the Trinity, the TRS-80 got a head start due to its price. By 1980, RadioShack had sold more than three times as many computers as Apple and Commodore. Many game developers such as Broderbund co-founder Doug Carlston got their start writing games on the TRS, which could only be found in RadioShack outlets. (Author's Note: Readers interested in more about the Trinity, and about the Apple II specifically, should look into my book Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution, published in hardcover by Schiffer Publishing in 2017.)

The TRS-80's lower cost of entry came at a price. RadioShack outfitted the computer with an Expansion Interface so users could connect more hardware, but the material was a bit shoddy. This led to adopters (somewhat affectionately) referring to the computer as the "Trash-80." But it was a starting point, and an affordable one, for developers such as Tim Ferris, who became known for creating Canyon Climber, the first platformer native to a personal computer.

My First Platformer

Released in 1982, Canyon Climber is notable for being the first platform game developed for a home system at the outset, rather than ported from an arcade title. Speaking of arcades, Ferris wears his inspiration from Donkey Kong on his sleeve. Canyon Climber takes place on three separate, single-screen stages, each with unique obstacles. You play a climber intent on scaling the Grand Canyon, or in design terms, reaching the top of all three stages by running, jumping, and climbing. 

That Ferris cribbed from Donkey Kong makes perfect sense. Remember, these were the early days of game development. It was easier to copy a game someone else had already made as a means of learning how to write code than it was to juggle the demanding tasks of learning a new language and devising a brand-new, fun design. There is a pitfall to copying a great game, though.

In my review of Kangaroo, I included a quote from Diablo co-creator Max Schaefer that said, in effect, clones of popular games often pay attention to the wrong details of the game their creators are copying. Diablo clones, or action-RPGs, tend to focus on loot and skill systems, but the beating heart of Diablo is the feedback from and simplicity of its click-driven interface. If Diablo had not been easy to pick up, and satisfying to interact with, few players would have bothered playing long enough to reach the game's later levels where the best loot is found.

Tim Ferris's Canyon Climber borrowed running, jumping, and climbing from Donkey Kong, but it missed subtle details and systems that made Nintendo's platformer the gold standard at this point in the genre's history. The game takes place on three distinct, single-screen stages. The first, called the Crevasse, features five platforms connected by ladders, each with a bridge that must be detonated for… reasons. The second, Indian Hills, takes place on another set of platforms strung together by ladders, with "Indians" (the very-non-politically-correct term used in the game manual) who shoot arrows at you as you traverse their platforms. Finally, Eagle Cliffs asks you to run and jump to the top of the stage while rocks dropped by eagles who have nothing better to do than make your ascent miserable.

In the Crevasse, you must set dynamite to both sides of each bridge and then press the plunger at the top to blow them up. You set the dynamite by running over each end of the bridge. Simple enough, right? Except there are goats running back and forth across each platform, and they have a nasty habit of changing directions at random. I would often wait for a goat to draw near and then jump over it, only for it to immediately turn around and charge into my back, costing me a life. A similar problem afflicts stage three, the Crevasse. Eagles fly overhead and drop rocks, but there's no pattern to when those rocks fall.

Neither behavior seemed deliberate. Sometimes goats would turn around and chase me after I'd leaped over them. Sometimes rocks would fall right in front of me, or behind me, or directly above me. Both behaviors seem to be determined by random-number generation. These arbitrary shifts didn't happen often enough to ruin my enjoyment of the stages in which they occur, but that doesn't make them less frustrating.

The larger issue here is that Canyon Climber is extremely simple. The Native Americans on stage two stand in the same places and fire arrows at the same rate. All you have to do is run at them and jump over arrows until you reach the ladder to the next platform. Climb up, rinse and repeat until you reach the top of the stage. You can pick up shields to deflect arrows for a limited time, but you can't jump or climb while holding a shield, so you're left standing around waiting for their protection to wear off so you can keep playing. Really, shields aren't worth the singular benefit they provide. Arrows fly toward you at the same rate, and lose altitude as they travel, so you're better off jumping over them and ignoring the shields. 

As for the random nature of the goats' charge and the placement of falling rocks, there's little you can do about either of them. If a goat chooses to turn around and gore you from behind, well, that's that. Rocks are easier to handle; just wait until the path ahead is clear and time your jumps over gaps. 

Even factoring in randomness, you should complete Canyon Climber in five to 10 minutes your first time through. Beating the game sends you back to the first stage to do it all over again. The game doesn't seem to raise its difficulty level on repeat cycles, so there's no reason to play the game more than once. In fact, there's just not much to Canyon Climber that makes it memorable.

That's not entirely a bad thing. Canyon Climber could be viewed as a fun if overly simple introduction to platform games for younger players. Also, it's worth keeping in mind that Ferris and every other game developer were new to making games at this period of the industry. Games database mobygames.com lists Canyon Climber as Ferris's first published title. Perhaps he made the best game he was capable of at the time.

However, treating Canyon Climber as the "See Spot Run" of platformers is a weak defense. Donkey Kong starts off easy, and is a much better game. Moreover, that difficulty scales with each stage as well as on repeat playthroughs. It also doesn't introduce much if any randomness to throw artificial difficulty at you. The barrels rolling down the slanted ramps of stage one never abruptly change directions. Just watch them and either climb a ladder out of their path, or time your jump over them.

That's one of the masterful subtleties of the game's design. Donkey Kong works for myriad reasons; among them is the surge of satisfaction that hits you after you pull off any maneuver. It could be as uncomplicated as hopping over a single barrel, or as involved as completing a stage by the skin of Mario's teeth. The game rewards you for pulling off feats great and small by instilling you with pride in and excitement for your skill. To have a barrel or fireball randomly change directions and roll over you, or to have the big Kong himself rain obstacles down in an arbitrary fashion, would suck the thrill out of your victories.

Then there's DK's masterful scalability. Each stage introduces new challenges--slight changes in paths to give players more choice in how they make their way up to Pauline, new mechanics such as lifts and rivets that must be removed, creating gaps that strand enemies on one side of a platform but create another hazard for players to manage--but retain the fundamental lessons taught in the first stage. When you're starting out with the game, you want to play every stage over and over because there's always something new to learn or try. When you come back to the game as a veteran, you want to survive longer than you did the previous time, perfecting your skills and setting new personal records (or attempting to shatter someone else's, as seen in the popular gaming documentary The King of Kong).

All this is to say that Canyon Climber is not a bad game. Far from it. The advent of personal computing and affordability of the TRS-80 gave Tim Ferris and other aspiring creators the means to make games on their own terms. That's huge. And in fairness, while Atari's landmark VCS/2600 console was making its way into homes the same year the "Trinity" debuted, most of its first wave of games were as facile and crude as Canyon Climber. All that aside, even neophytes will crave more than Canyon Climber can give them.

Score

• Graphics: 2/5. Blocky stick figures like something from the Atari VCS, but colorful, and you can tell what each object is supposed to be.
• Gameplay: 2/5. When accessibility goes too far, you get games like Canyon Climber. The randomness of certain hazards is aggravating, but it does break up the tedium of playing.
• Sound: 2/5. Remixes of classical music that sound how that music should sound, given the hardware limitations of the day. Adds or detracts nothing from the experience.
• Overall: 2/5. A decent introduction to platforming, but not worth more than a single playthrough.

Ranking

This list is subjective based on my experiences. I also can't promise I'll expand this ranking to include every platformer ever made. It may be simpler, and fairer, to rank platformers within the same "generation" of releases. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Without further ado, here are my rankings as of this entry. Click a game's title to read its review.

• 1. Donkey Kong
• 2. Kangaroo
• 3. Jump Bug
• 4. Space Panic
• 5. Canyon Climber
• 6. Crazy Climbers*

*I thought I should explain why Crazy Climbers has occupied the last slot in my rankings since I debuted my little chart a few entries/chapters ago. Crazy Climbers is a fine game, but it's not really a platformer. I don't foresee it moving from this spot unless a terrible game comes along and gives it a boost.

Game #5: Kangaroo (May 1982)

Background

• Developer: Sun Electronics
• Publisher: Sun Electronics, Atari (distributor)
• Debut: May 1982
• Platform: Arcade
• Home Ports: Atari 8-bit, Atari 2600, Atari 5200

Jackals

During my time interviewing Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North developers for Stay Awhile and Listen, my books chronicling the history of the two Blizzards with an emphasis on the Diablo franchise, Blizz North co-founder Max Schaefer said, “If anyone says their game is a 'something killer,' that's good if you're that 'something.' I think Diablo II endures in part because an insane amount of work was put into it, and we made a lot of correct decisions and approached it from a consistent sensibility that the so-called Diablo killers—which to some extent are trying to be Diablo, yet something different—tried to replicate. I don't think that's ever a particularly good way to go about dethroning a game, copying it.”

The concept of “killers” in the videogame industry dates all the way back to Pong. After Atari found success with its table tennis game, other coin-op manufacturers looked at its simple design and thought, We can make a table tennis game. Clones flooded the market. This incensed Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, who referred to the makers of these copycats as “jackals.” Despite Pong’s commercial success, Atari was still walking a knife’s edge. Bushnell’s approach was to churn out an endless wave of games featuring new concepts. By the time competitors latched on to one idea and copied it, he reasoned, Atari would already have another game, better and fresher than the last, in arcades.

In the words of one of the greatest philosophers of all time: “Begun, the Clone Wars have.”

Admittedly, rip-offs of ping-pong can only go so far: two-on-two matchups; change the background to blue and wahla—air hockey instead of table tennis. The Clone Wars ramped up after the mega-success of Space Invaders in 1975. Spaceships shooting aliens in space could be spun off in countless directions: multiple types of enemies with their own attacks and movement patterns, power-ups for the player’s ship, backgrounds other than a black screen dotted with white pixels.

Things haven’t changed in the past 45 years: Every time a new type of game emerges, manufacturers race to copy it. Donkey Kong, released in the summer of ’81, was no exception. Nintendo’s masterpiece offered an appealing set of tools and concepts to riff on: single-screen stages featuring unique layouts; jumping as the central mechanic, bolstered by secondary and tertiary abilities such as climbing and power-ups; subtle but appealing narrative elements that made players feel like they were involved in something bigger than competing for spots on high-score tables.

Kangaroo was among the first of several games to borrow heavily from Nintendo’s masterpiece, but its developers left room to stretch their legs and expand on many of DK’s ideas.

Hip-Hop

Sun Electronics Corporations was founded in April 1971 as—surprise, surprise—a maker and seller of electronics. In 1978, the company expanded into coin-op games. Its first two titles, Block Challenger and Block Perfect, were clones of Atari’s Breakout game. Kangaroo, released in May of ’82, was one of its first breakout (you know I’m punny by now, right?) hits. When Nintendo’s Famicom caught on, Sun Corp. continued to develop and publish games under the name Sunsoft, which would become one of the most beloved labels of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Kangaroo unapologetically borrows Donkey Kong as its foundation. Instead of a carpenter who scales construction sites to rescue his lady love, you play a mother kangaroo who’s been separated from her kid. To reunite them, you’ll climb ladders and jump over obstacles. Pretty familiar, right?

Ripping off, or cloning a game may be considered underhanded and lazy by those who created the first game of its type. It’s also attractive for developers looking to make a name for themselves in a crowded market. When you set out to make an original game, you need to think of everything: the game design, the code, the art, the sound. Starting with a tried and true premise eliminates a lot of overhead. Once you’ve earned a tidy profit cloning games, you’ll have the budget to experiment with your own ideas.

However, it’s not enough to clone a game and hope it catches on; countless other developers will be taking that approach as well. Your best bet is to sprinkle other ideas into a tested formula. That will make your game familiar to consumers, as well as attractive in how it differs ever so slightly from its predecessor(s).

Before we dig into how Kangaroo separates itself from Donkey Kong, we have got to talk about its cinematic intro, which may be the funniest thing I’ve seen in the history of cinematic intros. We open on a shot of multiple platforms, each with a kid kangaroo standing on the far right. Their mothers start on the far left, and hop toward them. “Mom!” the kids exclaim when their mothers reach them. One mother, our protagonist, doesn’t notice the gaping hole in the middle of the platform, and falls right through it, kicking and flailing as she plummets head-first to the ground. It looks like something out of a cartoon. It’s hilarious.

My disturbing lack of empathy aside, Kangaroo’s opening is a clear nod to Nintendo’s understated yet powerful usage of narrative to ground players in its world. A mother setting out to rescue her kid—who can’t get behind that?

Like DK, Kangaroo takes place on four stages. Each features a series platforms set on a single screen, so players can see every bit of terrain they need to traverse. Instead of barrels and fireballs, your enemies are monkeys that climb down the sides of the screen and run toward you hurling apples, and at least one monkey that marches back and forth along the top platform, dropping apples like bombs.

Here’s where Kangaroo does its own thing, and quite well. Monkeys can throw apples at your head, your legs, or your chest. Those apples come at you fast, so you have to think quickly to deal with them. Apples aimed at your legs must be jumped over. Apples on a trajectory toward your head can ducked under. Apples at chest level can’t be avoided by jumping or crouching; instead, you press the game’s single button to punch them.

Being able to crouch and punch as well as jump makes Kangaroo’s titular protagonist our most flexible hero (technically heroine) yet. Consider Space Panic, the first platforming game. You couldn’t jump, but you could dig holes to trap the aliens chasing you, but you had to fill those holes in to finish them off, or if you needed to get to the other side of a hole, since there was no jump action. While you were digging and filling, you had to quickly absorb the layout of the platforms and ladders granting access to those platforms, as well as monitor enemy movement. All these elements crashed headlong into one another, making gameplay dense and frustrating.

Kangaroo is the exact opposite. After punching, ducking under, or hopping over an apple, the threat has passed. There’s an ape on each stage that tries to steal your boxing glove, leaving you unable to punch, but you deal with him by punching him in his mouth and sending him flying off one side of the screen and onto the other. It’s very satisfying.

Best of all, the movement or button press required to neutralize or avoid obstacles is intuitive. Pull up on the joystick to jump, pull down to crouch, or press the game’s one and only button to throw a punch. That’s where Space Panic failed. On paper, defeating aliens by digging holes seems simple. In practice, it’s anything but. I do wish Kangaroo had a jump button instead of pushing up on the joystick, which I maintain is awkward. But that is a subjective complaint. (Playing Kangaroo on an emulator nullifies this issue: Simply map “jump” to the button of your choice. I used the default controls so that I could play the game as close to how it was intended as possible. Now that this review is finished, I plan to remap the button.)

Kangaroo’s mechanical accessibility does not always apply to other aspects of its design. Your objective on all four stages is to scale platforms and deal with or avoid obstacles to reach your kid, who, like DK’s Pauline, usually waits near the top (although not always, something we’ll explore in a moment). In some of these stages, platforms are arranged like a staircase, and in many instances your kangaroo jumps higher than the height of the second “step” in the arrangement. You would think, then, that you could skip hopping atop the lowest platform first. Not so.

Kangaroo’s collision detection is fussy. It will not register your avatar as standing on the platform, even if it’s below the maximum height of your jump, unless you first jump onto the first platform in the arrangement. To further our staircase analogy, you can’t skip steps. You have to jump on the first, then the second, and so on. This may not seem like a big deal, but stages can get hectic with monkeys climbing up and down, flinging apples in all directions. Seeing your kangaroo jump well over the top of a platform that the game will not allow you to land because you’re not tackling its terrain in the order it expects feels like an arbitrary decision.

The hectic nature of stages can work against you in an unexpected way. Without getting too technical, every piece of hardware has certain rules about how many objects can be displayed on a screen at once. Hardware can draw a certain number of objects per scanline. Programmers can pump out more pixels than the maximum, but doing so causes images to flicker, and can even cause slowdown. Sun Corp.’s engineers apparently ignored the rules about accommodating no more than X pixels per scan line on a display. Kangaroo doesn’t slow down, but stages two through four teem with sprites, leading to rampant flickering that can be distracting when there’s already so much on-screen action to track.

Aside from technical quirks, Kangaroo’s stages exhibit a fun variety of layouts and challenges that attempt to break away from Donkey Kong’s “reach the top to win a stage” goal. Your objective on every stage is to reach your kiddo, but the third stage breaks convention by placing the kid in a cage near the center. The cage is held aloft by a column of monkeys, each standing on the other’s shoulders. To reach it, you first must punch the lower monkeys out of position. Knocking away a monkey lowers the cage. Once it’s aligned with the closest platform, you must quickly find your way to the cage.

The rub is that you have to act fast. Dawdle, and other monkeys will rush to the column and raise the cage out of reach. Act too fast, and you might knock out too many monkeys, lowering the cage to the bottom of the screen. Another option is to knock away enough monkeys to bring the cage equal to the platform you have to jump from to reach it, but this is riskier. Like Donkey Kong, Kangaroo severely punishes falling. Dropping down to a platform, even one half an inch below your position, results in a death. Platforms must be even or higher than your position to safely scale them. Should you get carried away punching and let the cage fall too low, you’ll have to wait for monkeys to raise it back up. That’s dangerous, because more time spent on the level means greater odds to get clocked by apples or pugilist apes.

Hanging around stages longer than is necessary can be rewarding. You earn points for punching monkeys and apples, and for collecting fruit hanging over platforms. Each stage has a bell that you can ring to repopulate it with new fruits worth even more points. In that way, the game gives you a choice. You can either hang around collecting fruit and dispatching enemies or earn bonus points for completing a stage as fast as possible.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Kangaroo is its soundtrack. Instead of unique tunes that lend themselves to furthering the game’s identity, the soundtrack consists of generic folk music. It’s fine, but feels rote, as if someone at Sun Corp. said, “Well, we need music, I guess,” and figured out how to code Westminster Quarters (most often heard in the real world when a clock chimes on each quarter-hour) and “Oh! Susanna,” which plays when you complete a stage.

Although Kangaroo isn’t as polished as DK, it’s more robust in some ways. Its strengths offset my frustrations with it, especially in the context of how Nintendo influenced platformers before Super Mario Bros. came along and became the golden template forevermore.

Score

Graphics: 3/5. Colorful and varied, but flickering and other glitches mar the experience.

Gameplay: 4/5. From towers of monkeys and diverse arrangements of platforms to the quick thinking needed to react to obstacles, Kangaroo will keep you hopping. “Up” to jump, though? Miss me with that, Sun Corp.

Sound: 3/5. The soundtrack is a generic mix of folk songs, which is good for variety’s sake, but doesn’t do much to give Kangaroo an identity of its own.

Overall: 3/5. Kangaroo is a solid platformer—too solid at times. Its rigidity in navigating terrain conflicts with the flexibility it gives you in other areas. It’s fun, but some players may prefer DK due to its all-around polished execution.

Ranking

This list is subjective based on my experiences. I also can't promise I'll expand this ranking to include every platformer ever made. It may be simpler, and fairer, to rank platformers within the same "generation" of releases. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Without further ado, here are my rankings as of this entry. Click a game's title to read its review.

1.                  Donkey Kong

2.                  Kangaroo

3.                  Jump Bug

4.                  Space Panic

5.                  Crazy Climbers

Game #3 – Jump Bug (June 1981)

Background

• Developer: Alpha Denshi (under contract for Hoei/Coreland)
• Publisher: Sega (Japan), Rock-ola (North America)
• Debut: June 1981
• Platform: Arcade
• Home Ports: Arcadia 2001, PC-98

(Author's note: Because I'm the most organized person ever, I played Donkey Kong before Jump Bug. The latter hit arcades approximately four months before DK. Jump Bug should be game #3; Donkey Kong is game #4.)

Shmup-Jumper

I enjoy cooking. Well, okay, that's not entirely true. I enjoy eating the food that other people cook. One of my favorite homemade concoctions my mom made while I was growing up—and that I still request when Mom and I get together to celebrate my birthday—is a medley of eggs, toast, and milk. We call it Egg Cheese Stuff, because we are nothing if not great at naming things. It's got the consistency of cream of wheat, and it's delicious. I'd eat Egg Cheese Stuff every day if I could. (And I could, but my doctor would frown on that life choice.)

Egg Cheese Stuff opened my eyes to the idea of taking two disparate things and pairing them together. Jump Bug holds the honor of being the Egg Cheese Stuff of platformers, if you'll forgive the somewhat clumsy—but delicious—analogy, by squashing together elements of shooters and platform games.

To understand what makes Jump Bug unique, we need to run through a brief history of the shoot-em-up, or "shmup." Before early 1981, shmups tended to be clones of Space Invaders. Players controlled a ship and fought waves of aliens against the starry backdrop of space. Your ship appeared to be hurtling through space; in reality, the stars were redrawn over and over, creating the illusion of movement. The backdrop had no bearing on gameplay. Everything vital to winning or losing existed in the foreground: the aliens you were supposed to be shooting, Space Invaders' mountain-like barriers that absorbed laser blasts until they were reduced to rubble, power-ups that modified your attacks or defense, and, of course, your little spaceship.

In March of ‘81, venerable coin-op engineer Eugene Jarvis and his design partner Larry DeMar shook up the already-kinda-stale shmup formula with Defender, a shoot-em-up set on an alien planet. There were enemy ships to shoot down, natch, but Defender set itself apart by making that optional. Your primary objective was to protect astronauts by rescue, transport, and deposit astronauts to safety. Defender also boasted a technical first for the genre by scrolling the screen left or right. No longer were players constrained to single-screen star fields. Defender let them move left or right at a whim, or come to a standstill.

Defender's terrain was simple, drawn from lines and not filled in. Even so, it offered a setting more visually appealing than white pixels against a black backdrop, and a narrative hook rather than the simple but effective “shoot all the things.” One month earlier, Konami had released a groundbreaking shmup of its own.

Before blockbuster franchises such as Castlevania and Metal Gear, Konami established itself as a maker of frenetic shooters. Scramble was among its first, and its best. Instead of dropping you somewhere in space, Scramble featured discrete environments such as mountains and buildings. The game's terrain was filled in to give it a solid appearance, but instead of giving players control over movement, Scramble harnessed auto-scrolling to smoothly scroll in a set direction. It presented a case where limiting players’ options worked in their favor. With no need to consider which direction to go, players were able to concentrate on, say, the timing of dropping bombs to hit targets on the ground, and steering their ship to stay out of harm’s way.

Defender and Scramble are noteworthy for, among other reasons, featuring smooth scrolling years before Super Mario Bros., which, one could argue, made the feature a must-have in virtually every game that followed. Later in 1981, developer Alpha Denshi applied smooth scrolling in Jump Bug—part shmup, part platformer, all a total blast to play.

Drive and Jump

Jump Bug is weird in the best way. It's a shmup, but you pilot a springy Volkswagen Bug-like car instead of a spaceship. Instead of traveling through space, you navigate earth-like cities populated with hotels and casinos, caverns made from brick, mountainous terrain dotted with volcanoes, oceans teeming with hostile lifeforms. Every environment is distinctive and appealing, painted in bursts of color that demarcate each from the others.

The Bug you control is my favorite part of Jump Bug. It bounces every time you hit a surface; I couldn't help picturing it as a VW Bug outfitted with hydraulics, like a mash-up—ah, a theme!—of Volkswagen's classic vehicle and a souped-up lowrider.

Colorful environments and your bouncy Bug form the heart of Jump Bug. Every surface you see is a platform. You jump automatically when you touch a safe surface—meaning any pixels not inhabited by aliens or hazardous terrain such as the lava spurting up from a volcano—but holding up on the joystick catapults you even higher.

Before we go further, the method of performing a jump is my only major complaint about Bug Jump. As a card-carrying member of the NES generation, jumping by any other input other than pressing a button (preferably A, because any other button invites anarchy, and civilization is already holding on by a thread) feels off to me. Admittedly, pushing up on the joystick works okay here because it’s a joystick instead of a d-pad. Rolling my thumb from left or right on a pad to the up position has always felt awkward to me, and it’s too easy to do by accident, which can throw off your rhythm at best or cost you a life at worst.

Without any input from the player, the car will bounce just high enough to pose a problem: you may clip an alien, or miss one of the many jewels or bags of money that net you points. Pulling down on the stick moderates your bounce to more of a hop, and that's important. You can’t move forward as the screen auto-scrolls in assorted directions, but that’s a good thing; all you have to do is think about when to boost your jump by pulling up, when to curb it by pulling down, and when to leave your car alone by leaving the stick in its neutral position.

As in Scramble, limiting players’ options is a boon rather than a drawback. First, giving players a curated set of inputs and tying them to specific in-game actions makes Jump Bug accessible—much more so than Space Panic, which was deceptively difficult to play. Second, what you do, and when and where you do it, depends on your ability to read the playfield and factor in what’s right in front of you, and what’s coming up. The choices you make affect your score as well as your odds of survival. Being forced to juggle any other balls would be one decision too many.

There's a huge variety of terrain to navigate in Jump Bug, making this the most diverse platformer I’ve played yet. From cities to caverns and oceans, environments never change, so you can work on creating your preferred path through a level every time you play: along the ground, where bags of money tend to be found in larger quantities but where more aliens tend to roam; over high ground such as rooftops, where you'll find fewer but more valuable money bags; over clouds, many of which are worth bonus points, letting you bounce on them over and over until the auto-scroll forces you to pick where to move next.

I cannot overstate how fun jumping is in this game. There are stretches relatively free of hazards, inviting you to ping-pong between bonus-cloud platforms to rack up lots of points, or stick to the ground with an eye for what's coming up ahead. Hazards come in a wide variety such as volcanoes, aliens planted on the ground or falling from the sky or flying across the screen or weaving in and out of terrain. Each is a variable designed to challenge your ability to make quick adjustments to your position relative to theirs, accounting for the fact that you cannot slow your forward momentum. The game's one and only button shoots a fireball-like projectile that kills enemies in a single hit, and there are rows of aliens on the ground that can be wiped out with a single shot of your cannon, tearing through them like a rock through wet sheets of paper. One shot, one row of dead aliens. It's as satisfying to behold as it is simple and elegant to perform.

Every action in Jump Bug is fun, but how they come together to challenge your knowledge of what's coming next and your handling of the Bug’s bounciness is what makes the game addictive. Each time I played, I told myself I was going to determine a rhythm and path through each area, and stick to it. Each time I played, I ended up doing something different for no other reason than I felt compelled to indulge my curiosity and test my handling over the car.

Like my favorite breakfast, Jump Bug is an amalgam of things. Each works well on its own, but blended, they form a symphony that I'm going to be playing for a long time. I tried to think about shmup-platformers but couldn't name any I'd played. I probably have, you understand—platformers have been mixed with every type of game at this point—but none jumped out at me. After playing Jump Bug, I hope I encounter a lot more, and I hope they're even half as great.

Score

Graphics: 3/5. Colorful and varied, the areas of Jump Bug will keep you on your toes no matter how many times you bounce through them.

Gameplay: 5/5. Hopping on clouds, lining up elements such as the rate of your descent with the position of a bouncy alien worth lots of points, while avoiding Jokers and eyeing bonus-point clouds—it all comes together so well, and would be almost perfect if not for having to pull up on the joystick to jump.

Sound: 1/5. Beeps and bloops occasionally arranged into what passes for tunes.

Overall: 4/5. I'm only four games deep into my mission to play every platformer, but this is the first one I've played that was both new to me, and that I played as much for my enjoyment as to learn about its place in the genre's history.

Ranking

I'm on the crest of playing a round handful of platformers, so this seems the perfect time to roll out my overall rankings to determine how the games I've played stack up against one another. As a reminder, this is purely subjective, based entirely on my own experiences with the games. I also can't promise I'll expand this ranking to include every platformer ever made. It may be simpler, and fairer, to rank platformers within the same "generation" of releases. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Without further ado, here are my rankings as of this entry. Click a game's title to read its review.

1. Donkey Kong

2. Jump Bug

3. Space Panic

4. Crazy Climbers