Game #7: Ponpoko (Nov. 1982)

Background

Developer: Sigma Enterprises

Publisher: Sigma Enterprises (JP), Venture Line (NA)

Debut: Nov. 1982 (JP), Jan '83 (NA)

Platform: Arcade

Home Ports: N/A

Tacky

Ponpoko marks a rare occurrence in these reviews. It's the first platformer I've played in the genre's chronology that originated in arcades and never made its way to home systems. If you want to play it from the comfort of your living room or desk, you must download MAME or another arcade emulator (are there others? I honestly have no idea).

It's also significant for me as the second video game property to feature a tanuki, the first in my experience being Super Mario Bros. 3. My love for Japan's raccoon-dog hybrid dates back to 1989 when my grandparents bought me SMB 3 for Christmas and I first witnessed Mario and Luigi donning a tanuki suit, which let them fly--same as the leaf power-up--and transform into a stone statue that rendered them invincible for a few seconds. You could also bop baddies with your tail. That statue bit seems incongruous unless you understand the lore of the bake-danuki, a breed of tanuki chronicled in Japanese folklore and immortalized as stone statues found throughout Japan.

Another fun fact: Ponpoko is an onomatopoeia for the sound a tanuki makes! What's not to love about tanuki?!

Anyway. Ponpoko, named after its titular tanuki player-character, isn't as multifaceted as Mario's suit, but you still do all the things you'd expect a platformer to allow by this stage of the genre's evolution. You run, you jump, and you climb ladders in your quest to gather fruit sprinkled over platforms guarded by animals and riddled with tacks and pits. Clear all fruit from the board, and you proceed to the next stage.

You know the drill by now, but Ponpoko holds your interest through fast and responsive controls and its functionality as a Trojan horse: Ponpoko is a puzzle game disguised as a platformer. The animals patrolling each platform do not respond to your actions. They move back and forth, leaving you to figure out when and how to maneuver around them to grab fruit and continue upward. You've also got two types of jumps at your disposal, a running leap that carries you further but feels floatier than the faster but shorter stationary jump, good for skipping over pits and tacks, and you must master these intricacies to call on the right move at the right time.

A timer ticks down, and you need to pick up all that fruit before it expires. You want to be cautious, but not slow, since getting stuck behind a slow-moving enemy wastes precious seconds. The rate of enemy movement never changes, so you must factor things such as whether to approach an animal from behind or from its front, and its speed relative to yours. Finally, there are pots that contain either bonus fruit or a snake that moves at an excruciatingly slow pace, further holding you up if you get stuck behind it.

Ponpoko's complexity lies in its combination of these variables: enemy placement and how they move, the positions of fruit and traps, and deciding whether to break open pots and risk a snake emerging or ignoring them. I cannot stress enough the glacial pace at which these buggers slither around. It's the worst, but that's intentional.

Unleashing a snake on a platform inhabited by a normal enemy/animal forces you to rethink how you'll navigate their terrain given their varying speeds, and you'll usually lose several seconds waiting for a snake or regular animal or both to get the heck out of your way.

Playing Ponpoko is fun, but the downside is the levels never change. Everything about the first stage, for instance, remains static: the platforms, the positions of enemies and traps and fruit and pots, where enemies move and how fast they move there. This means a stage won't give you much trouble when you replay it, assuming you remember the optimal route around animals. But enemies moving at the same rate means there's really only one solution to a level.

Some areas are inaccessible until a bug moves beyond a certain point, such as platforms with a piece of fruit on the far left and a ladder leading to the next platform on the far right. Missing a step is like missing the train or bus to work. The next ride is due in a few seconds, not nearly enough time to do anything other than stand around and wait for it to pull up.

Pots present an opportunity to cut down on each level's play time. Remember, their contents never change. If the third pot on the left side of the second platform on level 5 contains a piece of fruit, it will always contain that piece of fruit. Since you're not dropping quarters into MAME, you could crack open every pot your first time through to memorize their contents, then only break open those that hold bonus fruit when you play. Or you could do what I did and just ignore pots. You earn bonus points for clearing a board quickly, so I concentrated on gathering fruit as fast as possible rather than risk upsetting slithering serpents, or worse, getting stuck behind one in traffic.

If this sounds like a major turnoff, it's not. Getting better-navigating stages faster--is a key factor in platformer games. Ponpoko's audiovisuals are lackluster, especially when compared to those of a certain 800-pound gorilla, but the responsiveness of controls and the fun challenge of improving as I played kept me coming back to this one more than any other game I've reviewed so far save for Donkey Kong.

And if I'm being honest, most of these primeval platformers suffered from repetition. We're still a few years away from the Mario game that cracked the genre wide open. Until then, Ponpoko is worth a download and your time. Its rudimentary presentation belies intricate controls and an addictive puzzle-oriented challenge that lays a foundation for future puzzle-platformers like Prince of Persia.

Score

Graphics: 2/5. Rudimentary bordering on ugly, but they get the job done.

Gameplay: 4/5. Repetitive at its core. But I have no problem overlooking that each time I lay hands on the controls and beat my top score.

Sound: 1/5. Hardly worth a mention.

Overall: 4/5. Ponpoko is a gem buried deep in the primordial ooze of platformers. Its relative rarity compared to the countless ports of games like Donkey Kong make it a novelty, but its (slightly more) complex gameplay elevates it above most competitors of its era.

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. Ponpoko 

• 3. Kangaroo
• 4. Jump Bug
• 5. Space Panic
• 6. Canyon Climber
• 7. 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 #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 #4 – Donkey Kong (July 1981)

Background

• Developer: Nintendo
• Publisher: Nintendo
• Debut: July 1981
• Platform: Arcade

(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.)

Monkeying Around

In the first chapter of Dungeon Hacks, my book about formative roguelike RPGs such as Rogue (obviously) and NetHack, I gave a brief overview of convergent evolution. It's a biological process where two or more unrelated organisms follow similar evolutionary paths. These organisms don't have to be related, nor does convergent evolution end up making them interchangeable. For instance, a bird and a bat can both fly, but they share little else in common.

Donkey Kong evolved from ideas found in Space Panic and Crazy Climbers. It has more in common with the former than the latter, really, since Crazy Climbers is a pure climbing game rather than a platformer. Still, grasping DK's fundamental similarities and differences is important to realizing just how influential and evolved it was compared to its forebearers.

The origin of Donkey Kong and its popular protagonist has been exhaustively covered, so I'll keep my telling brief. Aspiring toymaker Shigeru Miyamoto landed a job at a company called Nintendo after his dad called in a favor with a mutual friend of Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo Company Limited (aka NCL, Nintendo's headquarters in Japan) from 1949 until 2002. Miyamoto was hired as the company's first artist. His first job was drawing artwork for a coin-op game called Sheriff. Then moved on to Radar Scope, a submarine game where players looked through a telescope and shoot enemy ships. Radar Scope bombed, so Yamauchi, determined to put all the monitors, cabinets, and circuit boards taking up space in Nintendo's warehouses, to good use, assigned Miyamoto to another project, a game inspired by (but not based on) Popeye.

When Nintendo failed to acquire the Popeye license, Miyamoto pivoted, designing a King Kong-like ape who kidnaps Pauline, the girlfriend of a construction worker named Jumpman, and holds her hostage at the top of four unique construction sites. (Okay, I guess climbing four tall buildings is another shared trait of DK and Crazy Climbers. It's very specific, and likely accidental.) You play as Jumpman, and your goal is to scale those construction sites and rescue Pauline. Before the game launched in America, higher-ups at Nintendo worried that Americans wouldn't get behind a character named Jumpman. They renamed him Mario, named after Mario Segali, Nintendo of America's landlord in the early '80s who stormed a board meeting and demanded rent that was past due.

Saving Pauline isn't as simple as climbing ladders and running across platforms. Donkey Kong antagonizes you the whole time, throwing barrels, siccing autonomous fireballs on you, and challenging Mario to cross a variety of terrain from platforms to lifts to collapsing floors.    

Those are surface details. We've established that Donkey Kong was not the first platformer. In every way, however, it was the first platformer that counted. The innovations Miyamoto and his scrappy team introduced are many, so let's get to climbing.

Kong Country

Nintendo's engineers kept things simple. The cabinet supported two players who took turns controlling Mario/Jumpman, guiding him with a joystick and a single button. It's not exaggeration to say that that single button revolutionized video games.

You'll remember that the object of Space Panic is to dig holes and wait for aliens to fall into them. The trouble is, digging a hole creates more problems than it solves. There's no way to jump over the hole should you need to cross to the other side. You have to either fill it in, or climb down a nearby ladder, run across the platform below it, and scamper up another ladder on the other side of the hole. The lack of a jump action adds to the game's strategy, but it's more frustrating than anything else, one of many reasons why the game failed to make money in arcades.

Donkey Kong lets you jump, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Pressing jump without touching the joystick launches Mario a few feet off the ground. To jump over obstacles, press the button while moving left or right. The elegance and versatility of such a simple action cannot be overstated.

Mario's jump works so well because the elements of that jump—namely height and horizontal distance—are immutable. Unlike later games featuring Mario, Donkey Kong has no run button; you can't build momentum to jump farther. What you see is what you get: No matter how fast you're moving, the height and distance of your jump never change. When you attempt to jump over a pit and onto, say, a rising platform, but fall short, you know it's not because the game cheated. It's because you jumped too early. The game tacitly communicates this information visually: you see Mario, you see where you jumped from, and you see where you landed. Players absorb that knowledge and learn to apply it.

Unlike later games, Mario doesn't control well in midair; he rises and falls at the same velocity no matter where you jump from. In fact, you can't steer him midjump at all. This, too, is a limitation that works in the player's favor. In 1981, virtually every type of coin-operated video game except shoot-em-ups—popularized by Space Invaders in '75—was unknown to players. I could be wrong, but my bet is that introducing mechanics such as maneuvering a character in midair would have overcomplicated the design and frustrated players. It's enough, and better, for players to know exactly how high and how far they can jump, and put that into practice stage by stage, secure in the fact that their mastery over the few tools at Mario's disposal is all they need to win.

You're given one more tool: a power-up, Mario's hammer. After picking it up, Mario automatically swings it for a limited of time, obliterating any obstacles within range and increasing your score. Hammers can be used whenever you're ready to grab them, but they're best saved for desperate situations, such as when barrels and fireballs close in on all sides.

Run, jump, climb, and pound. The particulars of when and where those maneuvers come into play changes from stage to stage. Donkey Kong's stages are another game changer. Space Panic's arrangement of ladders platforms changes slightly from stage to stage, but the architecture itself remains the same. You always run across stony-like platforms and climb ladders. The same can be said of other popular video games of the era. Space Invaders doesn't take place in any other venue other than against a starry backdrop. You always fight the same waves of aliens with the same barriers between you and them. Other shoot-em-ups such as Asteroids change up the configuration of obstacles like rocks or waves of enemy ships, but the terrain is always the same.

Donkey Kong features four unique stages, or "boards"—an apt term, since each stage can be thought of as a different board game, each of which happens to use the same pieces. The first stage, and the most iconic, features quintessential platforming: sloped platforms for barrels to roll down, ladders to ascend, and obstacles to jump over. It's a tutorial in every way except name. The difference from DK's first stage and most contemporary games is there are no lengthy cinematics to sit through or walls of text to climb. Nintendo has you learn by doing, a practice that would come to define their games going forward (with the occasional misstep such as 2011's ponderous The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword).

The next level, another construction site, introduces subtle changes. You're still climbing ladders and dodging obstacles, but to get to the top, you have to run over rivets until the structure collapses and sends the titular ape tumbling to the ground. Running over a rivet causes it to disappear. Enemies on one side won't be able to reach you on the other; the catch is that you can fall through holes after removing rivets, and even a one-story fall can kill Mario. This adds a note of tension. By this time, you're comfortable with your jump, and you'll have to perform more of them, and more accurately, to avoid fireballs and holes.

Yet another stage, a factory, has you riding lifts and leaping narrow pits. A spring-like obstacle bounces across the topmost floor and drops into the stage. The factory's design is methodical. The spring starts in the same place, bounces the same distance, and falls from the same location, at the same interval. Your advantage is that the spring falls near the right edge of the screen. Players figure out that the stage is best tackled in two phases. Phase on: ride and jump from lifts to cross from the left side of the screen to the middle. Phase two: carefully hop pits and avoid springs as they fall while climbing to the top.

All four stages take place on a single screen, but the factory functions as two stages in one. That purposeful design by Nintendo lets you devote all your attention to one or two obstacles at a time: lifts and perilous fall distances on the left, and ladders and springs on the right. Moreover, each half of the screen builds on what you've learned thus far. You know how to climb ladders. You know obstacles can be avoided or jumped over, depending on their actions. You know pits must be jumped, and that falling too far will result in a lost life.

Teaching players how to use their tools and placing them in situations that call on them to use their tools in slightly different but always related scenarios is a staple of platforming games, and it started with Donkey Kong.

Last but not least, Donkey Kong is one of the first video games to present a narrative. I say "one of" because earlier, text-only adventure games on PC, such as Colossal Cave Adventure, had stories… kind. Adventure just had you exploring a cave; the narrative was, figure out what's going on and escape. What else are you going to do? The designers of Infocom's Zork series deserves more credit for constructing what is essentially an interactive novel. Those games were effective. They were also limited. Personal computers were relatively expensive in the early '80s, limiting access to the businesses and high-income households able to afford them. Arcades were everywhere.

Enter Donkey Kong, widely acknowledge as the first video game to feature visual storytelling. Donkey Kong, Mario, and Pauline are individual characters with (sometimes threadbare) motivations. Donkey Kong is angry at this carpenter and wants to hurt him, so he steals his girl. Pauline wants to escape, and, presumably, not fall to her death. Mario, the hero, wants to save her. There are even cutscenes, such as a reunion "cinematic" (in the leanest sense of the word) that shows Donkey Kong falling to the ground while Mario and Pauline make goo-goo eyes at each other, represented by a giant pink heart at the top of the screen.

Admittedly, Donkey Kong's narrative is cruder than something like Zork, whose text-driven adventure unfolds over the entire game. Remember, though, that Donkey Kong's theatrical-like narrative was unprecedented. Protagonist. Antagonist. Goal. The stages repeat after you conquer the rivet stage, but the difficulty scales upward, so you can reunite Mario and Pauline again and again.

That brings us to the elephant in the room. Miyamoto has stated in numerous interviews that he didn't put much thought into the game's story. The fairytale archetype of a damsel in distress fit the bill: it was simple to execute and easy for players to grasp. That archetype would become the gold standard for dozens of arcade games that followed, especially in beat-em-ups like Technōs Japan's Double Dragon and Capcom's Final Fight.

Reducing women to trophies and finish lines is, admittedly, problematic. Without defending Miyamoto or other designers, bear in mind that most game designers in the '80s weren't setting out to tell grand stories, nor could they. Technology was limited. Developers were learning as they went along, budgets were shoestring-sized, and time was limited. They needed quick and dirty archetypes, and Donkey Kong made one accessible.

To this day, Miyamoto maintains that gameplay must take precedence over every other aspect of game development. He used the archetype because he had neither the resources nor inclination to attempt a loftier narrative. Back in these halcyon days, most games were designed by men, for boys. This is not my attempt to defend the damsel-in-distress archetype or its widespread application; I only want to provide context. Videogame stories have come a long way, and more women are playing and making games—all of which is for the best.

Most germane to our discussion, even platformers have grown far beyond simple archetypes. One of my favorites, and one of the most effective in terms of narrative, in 2014's Shovel Knight by Yacht Club Games. Shovel Knight's creators started out with a damsel in distress, only to take a step back, evaluate the trappings of the games they were seeking to emulate—platformers such as Mega Man, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link—and take their damsel to the next level. Shield Knight ended up framed as Shovel Knight's "partner." She was abducted by a woman, and you do rescue her, but the final boss against the evil enchantress can only be completed with Shovel Knight fighting alongside you. (Disclosure: I wrote a book about the making of Shovel Knight for Boss Fight Books.)

I discussed the damsel-in-distress archetype because it was important to Donkey Kong, and it played a huge part in games to come. I'm glad we've moved past it. Make no mistake, thought: its presence does not take away from Donkey Kong's fantastic design, or its influence. It may not be the first platformer, but it's the one that gave designers and players all the tools they needed to take the ball and run (and jump) with it, and remains the crowning achievement of the genre's first generation. 

Score

Graphics: 3/5. Simple, but effective. Bonus points for cramming four distinct stages into a measly 20 kilobytes of memory.

Gameplay: 4/5. Responsive, accessible, and addictive. This is what platformers are made of.

Sound: 5/5. Donkey Kong featured iconic sound effects for every action, from jumping, to bouncing, to Donkey Kong's roaring laughter, to smashing obstacles with a hammer. Background music was used sparingly, but it's as catchy in 2020 as it was in 1981.

Overall: 4/5. This is as good as it gets for the first generation of platform games, and it's very good indeed.

Game #2 – Crazy Climber (Oct. 1980)

Background

• Developer: Nichibutsu
• Publisher: Nichibutsu
• Debut: October 1980
• Platform: Arcade
• Home Ports: Atari VCS/2600 (1982), Nintendo Famicom ('86), Sharp X68000 PC ('93), PlayStation ('96), PlayStation 2 ('05), PlayStation 4 ('14)

How High Can You Get?

If you've read my manifesto about Run and Jump, you know I stated my intention to play every platforming game ever, in chronological order of release. Two games in, and I've already skipped ahead and doubled back—sort of.

Unlike Space Panic, considered the "granddaddy" of platformers, Crazy Climber shares more in common with pure climbing games than platformers. In fact, there's not a platform to be found in Crazy Climber. It's just you, ridiculously tall skyscrapers, and birds, monkeys, and residents determined to knock you off.

The game's developer/publisher, Nichibutsu, is a relative unknown today, but was hugely influential in its native country. Founded as Nihon Bussan in October 1970, Nichibutsu was based in Osaka, Japan, as a manufacturer and seller of coin-operated amusement games. The company entered the video arcade market in 1978 with Table Attacker, a clone of Atari's Breakout. Blatant clones—pejoratively dubbed rip-offs or copycats, especially by the creators who came up with the original concept—were common through the '70s, '80s, and even '90s. Many amateur developers taught themselves how to code by writing their own versions of coin-op games, then sold the fruits of their labor to publishers.

Nichibutsu released its first original hits, Moon Cresta, a shoot-em-up, and Crazy Climber in July and October of 1980, respectively. Released one month before Space Panic, Crazy Climber became Nichibutsu's first original hit. The premise is simple. You play a decidedly crazy climber who got it in his crazy head to scale a skyscraper. Like climbing Mount Everest, this guy's doing it because it's there, I suppose.

On your way up, you'll have to shimmy back and forth to avoid the atomic bird droppings (okay, they're probably fruit, but "atomic bird droppings" is funnier) launched by condors that fly back and forth across the screen, residents that drop flower pots and other heavy objects from their windows, windows shutting on your fingers, and bosses such as a giant, King Kong-like ape. Playing involves more forethought than the average arcade game of the time, making the game appealing for players looking to spend yen or quarters on a more strategic experience.

There are four skyscrapers to climb. At the top of each is a helicopter that sticks around for 30 seconds before flying off. If you manage to board the 'copter, you're taken to another building. Once you've ascended all four—if you can make it that far—you're taken back to the first building, and the game repeats until you run out of lives or quarters.

So, as stated, there are no platforms in Crazy Climber. That's why I decided to write about it after Space Panic. It is, however, a climbing game, and climbing is an integral mechanic of the genre, so it warrants discussion here.

Arcades are a dying breed, and what I miss the most about them is the experimental nature of games—the sorts of cabinet builds and control apparatuses that couldn't be easily ported to computers and home consoles. Crazy Climber is an early example of such design. There are no buttons. You climb using two joysticks: one that controls your left hand, and another that controls your right hand. Pulling left or right on both sticks moves your character in either direction, which is how you dodge projectiles as you make your way to the top.

Climbing is a multi-step process. First, you have to reach for the next part of the building by pushing up on each joystick. Next, you lift yourself up by pulling down on the sticks. You can operate both hands at once, or one at a time.

It's an incredibly tactile process that takes some getting used to; my first few attempts at playing were spent getting a handle on movement. Once it clicks, it's exciting and engaging, much more so than tapping buttons. I controlled my crazy climber like I was cross-country skiing, opting to reach and lift with one hand, then the other, back and forth. This has the added benefit of letting you climb faster if you're able to fall into a rhythm; your climber is quite strong, and is able to lift himself up with a single hand.

Crazy Climber's control scheme is the game's greatest strength, and its weakness. Because you have to control your arms independently, your character can wind up in positions that leave you unable to control your movement, such as one arm raised or lowered too much or too little. Depending on your position, you'll try to sidle left or right to dodge projectiles, only to scoot an inch, or not move at all. I lost many rounds by hanging in place while flower pots and atomic poop sailed downward, knocking me loose and leaving me frustrated. Fortunately, you reappear where you fell, assuming you still have lives. Inserting more quarters doesn't buy extra lives, so you've got to make the three you have count.

Climbing is also problematic. I got into a groove using my cross-country style of climbing, but every now and then, my character's body fell out of sync, causing him to raise an arm but refuse to pull himself up when I pulled down on a stick. On other occasions, he'd lower himself to where he was a moment earlier. Aside from maneuvering yourself to either side of long, vertical windows which cannot be scaled, there's no reason to descend in Crazy Climber. There were times when I spent more time trying to figure out why my avatar wouldn't climb than I did climbing.

Crazy Climber deserves recognition for introducing the climbing mechanic that would go on to define countless platformers to follow, and for implementing a control scheme almost perfectly suited to the experience it aspires to provide. It also deserves recognition for one specific technical achievement: scrolling. The screen scrolls upward as you near the top edge. This was an era when most games took place on a single screen, or playfield, like Space Panic. Skyscrapers appear more or less identical, but a game "world" that couldn't be contained on a single screen was novel for the time.

Crazy Climber is fun for a few rounds, but you're more likely to move on to another platformer out of frustration with its finicky controls than out of boredom with its gameplay loop.

Score

Graphics: 2/5. Rudimentary, but cartoonish in a charming way. The squiggly grin of residents who have nothing better to do than rack up a murder charge always make me giggle.

Gameplay: 3/5. I love the controls, I hate the controls.

Sound: 1/5. Beeps for sound effects, beeps for music. It's just enough to be immersive.

Overall: 2/5. The often-inexplicable circumstance of getting stuck and being unable to move or climb became maddening. That's too bad, because the game is fun, if a bit too simplistic to play for more than a few minutes at a time.

Game #1 - Space Panic (Nov. 1980)

Background

• Developer: Universal
• Publisher: Universal
• Debut: November 1980
• Platform: Arcade
• Home Ports: PV-1000 (1981), ColecoVision (1983), various clones (e.g., Apple Panic on the Apple II)

Can You Dig It?

Even the most devoted players have gaps in their gaming history. The medium has grown exponentially in the past decade; mobile games, console games, PC games, indie, triple-A, free-to-play, web browser—no one can play everything. If you've played Donkey Kong, released by Nintendo in 1981 and famously designed by Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto, you may think you've been a fan of platformers, or at least familiar with them, since the beginning: running, jumping, and power-ups.

Right? I thought so, too! Turns out we were wrong.

Space Panic is considered the granddaddy of the genre, meaning one of the earliest examples that historians and game developers—notably famed writer and designer Chris Crawford—agree meets the minimum criteria of a platformer. (It wasn't the first, but we'll discuss that in the next article.) There's running, there's climbing, there are platforms, and there are obstacles in the form of enemies. If you're more acquainted with Nintendo's style of platformer, however, you may see only a passing resemblance at first, especially if you're coming to Space Panic for the first time, as I have.

Genre is a tricky thing. You can't get too particular in defining one, especially in 2020, when so many games are amalgams of this, that, and the other game mechanic. The platformer itself is a sub-genre of the action game, where players jump and climb over suspended platforms to achieve some goal—go through an exit door, descend a flagpole, etc.

Running. Jumping. Climbing. Mario does all three of those, but while Donkey Kong solidified the contemporary definition of platformer, Space Panic predates it by several months. (Release dates were nebulous before the advent of pre-order dates for games like Sonic the Hedgehog 2, whose release date was dubbed "Sonic 2sday" in Sega's marketing campaign, and Mortal Kombat, which released on "Mortal Monday," September 13, 1993. Universal distributed it to arcades in 1980, and it began appearing in November. Nintendo's famous ape didn't nab Pauline and scale construction sites until the fall of 1981.)

Space Panic, published and developed by Universal.

The goal of Space Panic is simple to state, but difficult to achieve. You're a "man"—extra lives are referred to as "extra men," a colloquial term from when games were designed by men, starred male characters, and predominantly played by men—in an unnamed area in space made up of suspended platforms connected by ladders. There are aliens running amok, wouldn't you know it, and you've got to defeat them by digging holes in the platforms, luring them into said holes, and refilling those holes so they fall through, eliminating it from play.

Speaking of holes, Space Panic filled more than one gap in my gaming knowledge. I'd never played it, for one. For two, this is, to the best of my recollection, my foray into the "digging" genre. I know of Lode Runner, but never played it. Maybe because I was too young to play most video games before Super Mario Bros. and the NES made its way into my household: there were so many other games to play that Lode Runner and its many clones sailed right over my head.

Which brings me to the next shocker, at least for me. Designed for one player or two players who take turns at the joystick, Space Panic lets you dig, climb, and run, but there's no jump button. I struggled with this, to put it lightly. Donkey Kong was the first platformer I'd played. Some verbs describe a type of game perfectly. For platformers, and for me, jump is that verb. Not being able to hop around made me feel like I was playing one-handed, which I probably could since the controls are simple.

One button digs holes. Another button fills them in. Remember, though, that you cannot job. If you dig a hole and decide you want to walk across it, well, you can't. You'll have to refill that hole to step across it, or take the long way around by climbing or descending ladders and hurrying to and fro across platforms. You could also opt to drop through it, and you won't take any damage, a decision Nintendo wouldn't incorporate in its platformers until later, thus making it a strategic decision in Space Panic.

Trapping aliens isn't as simple as digging a hole and waiting for one to fall through. Not only do you have to consider how and where digging holes affects your navigation options, you must press the dig button repeatedly. If an enemy reaches your hole before it's finished, it'll stumble over it then refill it and continue the chase. You can't use that shovel to fight back, either. Your options are run, climb, dig, and fill. If an alien drops into one of your pits, you need to be ready to refill it, or it will haul itself out and refill the hole.

On top of all that, not all aliens go down easily. Red aliens are the easiest to topple; trap them, fill in their hole, and they plummet to the next platform and helpfully disappear. Green aliens, however, need to fall at least two stories. That means you need to dig a hole in one platform, then dig a hole directly above or below it. You can't dig too near ladders, so you've got to play realtor and consider location, location, location. The difficulty ramps up quickly. By level 3, you'll have red and green aliens to contend with. By level 4, gray aliens, which must fall even further, enter the fray.

This may not sound too complex on paper. In practice, it's a lot to wrap your head around. Like the ghosts in Pac-Man, aliens wander at first but quickly grow aggressive. Digging a hole takes just long enough that you'll have to choose spots to dig as you're avoiding aliens and climbing ladders. Early on, I hit on a strategy that worked well. Find a space between two ladders and dig a hole on either side. The aliens will eventually come to you. Fill in each hole as fast as you can, then dig another.

That strategy falls to pieces by level 3. Space Panic is a coin-op game, which means time is money. An oxygen meter in the lower righthand corner depletes, functioning as both a timer and a bonus score. The more oxygen you have left when you clear a level, the more bonus points you'll get at the end. Of course, this means digging holes around you and waiting for aliens to trip their way in consumes a lot of time, which is a bad idea on later levels when you need to be on the move and setting up two or more vertically aligned holes to defeat tougher aliens.

It's a compelling game loop, but consumers weren't ready for its complexity in 1980. "No punning intended when I say that the rungs were too high for the average gamer to scale," wrote Electronic Games magazine in 1983; the editor went on to note that the average play time was recorded at 30 seconds. Reader, I admit that this near-40-year-old loop challenged me in 2020. Despite draining my oxygen, I was more comfortable entrenching myself between pits. Later levels add more ladders, which is good for navigation, but bad for digging, since holes can't be placed too close to ladders.

Perhaps the worst part is that when you die, the level repopulates with aliens. Platforming standards weren't set in stone by this point. The cement was still drying. Still, wiping out all but one alien only to make a mistake and have to start over is demoralizing. There were times when I opted to stop playing rather than try again. Each credit, or quarter, also buys you a finite supply of lives. Three strikes and you're out.

I'm tempted to play Monday morning quarterback and say that the addition of a jump button would have made the gameplay much smoother. Being able to hop over a hole while being chased would be convenient. It would also probably make the game far too easy, an unappealing prospect for coin-op developers and operators looking to devour quarters in as short a span of time as possible.

Nevertheless, Space Panic qualifies as a platformer as much as it's also a "climbing" or "digging" game, and is a good example of the branches that connect games on platforming's leafy family tree. Universal deemed the game a commercial failure overall, which isn't surprising. It's tough, and the gameplay loop is so simple that its charm wears off after a few turns. Still, clones such as Broderbund's Apple Panic on the Apple II did quite well, likely because playing at home without having to worry about your mom's finite supply of quarters gave players more opportunities to sharpen their skills.

There's no denying Space Panic sets the stage for greatness. Almost all the pieces are there. The action takes place on a single screen, there are plenty of ladders to climb, and thinking on your feet while zipping around and digging is fun. Just not for long. I recommend taking Space Panic for a spin to understand how platformers started, but be prepared to move on to greener, bouncier pastures within a few minutes.

Score

Graphics: 1/5. Crude, but serviceable and neat, until levels become cluttered with ladders.

Gameplay: 2/5. Deceptively challenging. The fun you'll have on levels 1 and 2 will soon be overshadowed by frustration as aliens, ladders, and the complications of dispatching tougher foes sets in.

Sound: 1/5. Space Panic exhibits the beeps and bloops typical of the era. They're grating enough that I'd almost prefer to play the game muted. The audio is glitchy on MAME, so I only heard the end-of-level fanfare; I watched videos on YouTube to get an idea of how the game sounded during play.

Overall: 2/5. Not a bad game, but not a particularly engrossing one either.