Game #8: Donkey Kong Junior (Aug. 1982)

Background

Developer: Nintendo R&D1, Iwasaki Engineering

Publisher: Nintendo

Debut: Aug 1982 (JP)

Platform: Arcade

Home Ports: NES, Famicom and Famicom Disk System, Atari 2600/7800/8-bit PCs, ColecoVision/Adam, Intellivision, BBC Micro, Virtual Console, and probably 10,000 others I'm forgetting.

Highs and Lows

From the outside looking in, Nintendo often seems to have no idea what it's doing. From sticking with cartridges on the N64 instead of switching to the (admittedly easier to pirate) CD-ROM format, to the bumbling transition from Wii to Wii U, to everything about the Virtual Boy, to its reliance on Friend Codes for online play on the Switch, the "Big N" has plenty of misses. We forgive it, though, because its hits are home runs.

There's another reason I and countless other Nintendo diehards give it a pass: More than most other video game publishers, developers, and hardware manufacturers, Nintendo has shown a willingness, even an eagerness, to experiment. Look no further than Donkey Kong Junior, a follow-up to its seminal Donkey Kong game. Donkey Kong Junior could have been an easy cash-in. Build four or more stages for Mario--then Jumpman--to run and jump around in, have Donkey Kong kidnap poor Pauline again, and watch the quarters flow. Instead, upstart designer Shigeru Miyamoto turned almost everything about his breakout classic on its head. For starters, Mario is the villain, and he's dastardly.

(Shigeru Miyamoto famously classified Mario and friends as actors able to play the wide variety of roles in which he casts them. I like that analogy, but could you imagine Mario being the big bad today? It would never happen. Of course, I'm writing this in 2020, the Year of Ugly and Awful Things, so a monkey's paw lying forgotten in one of Miyamoto's desk drawers probably just curled. Sorry in advance.)

The game begins with a cutscene showing two Marios trapping Donkey Kong in a cage and carrying him off, ostensibly to transport him back to the zoo so he'll stop wrecking construction sites and kidnapping women. (Some fans speculate that the second Mario may have served as the inspiration for Luigi, who made his debut in a game we'll discuss soon.) That leaves Donkey Kong Junior, the big ape's diapered kiddo, to save his papa.

Donkey Kong Junior comprises four stages, but with major changes to Donkey Kong's critically and commercially successful formula. You'll do some running and jumping as Junior, and I'll get to why that's the weakest part of the game soon. Kiddie Kong distinguishes himself from his dad by going back to the platforming genre's roots: Climbing.

We know from the genre's earliest games that climbing went hand in hand with running; jumping didn't arrive on the scene until later. Donkey Kong Junior's stages resemble jungles more than construction sites, with vines hanging from treetops and other platforms that Junior can use to reach Mario, who holds Donkey Kong prisoner at the top of each board. Donkey can shimmy up one vine at a time, or stretch to grab an adjacent vine and shoot upward and double speed. Climbing down also comes in two flavors: grab two vines and descend at the same speed, or stick to one and slide down twice as fast.

This variety in climbing speeds feeds into Donkey Kong Junior's more puzzle-oriented composition. Mario climbed ladders in the first game, but spent most of his time jumping over barrels, fireballs, and pits. In Donkey Kong Junior, you climb, descend, and move across vines while avoiding enemies: some that climb up and down to get at you, others that fly at varying altitudes while dropping eggs. You'll spend most of your time clutching a vine or two and scooting up, down, and from side to side to avoid obstacles while making your way across screens to areas that lead to the top of the screen and the passage to the next stage.

Figuring out the safest route to the top is the highlight of Donkey Kong Junior. While the first game centered on execution--run and jump your way to the top--this follow-up wants you to plan and then execute. No plan survives the battlefield: You can stand around observing the birds on stage two as long as you need, learning when and where they'll descend, and how often they'll drop eggs. Nintendo also evolved fruit from optional items worth a few extra points, the role apples and bananas and other sugary goodies have played in platformers into weapons. Touching a fruit earns you points and causes it to drop. Time your movements well, and you can drop fruit on enemies, buying yourself a temporary reprieve before Mario unleashes a new minion to take its place.

Inevitably, you'll find yourself in the thick of vines, frantically moving from one to the other and climbing and descending to dodge them as you inch your way to the right and, finally, up to the platform where Mario awaits. The game shines at this junction: You've finally reached the top and are as proud of the way you devised to get there as you are of executing your plan and adapting to the chaos that awaits at the top of most stages.

The less time you spend with your feet on the ground, the better. Platforming is the weakest part of Donkey Kong Junior. Fortunately, three of the four stages favor climbing, but the third is heavy on running and jumping, which combines with a franticness to enemy population and movement patterns that proves too much to handle. But there's more wrong with the platforming than The game's namesake moves stiffly, just like Mario in the previous game, but that's more detrimental here, and I needed time to understand why. The answer, as games historian and Nintendo expert Jeremy Parish reveals in episode 20 of his "NES Works" series documenting the chronological release of NES games, lies in sprite proportions.

In short, Junior is wider than Mario. As he should be. He's an ape, and Nintendo gave him an aptly stooped posture as he stands and walks. His dimensions are problematic, however, because they make judging distance difficult. Junior's width and reach often fools you into thinking he can clear a gap when he can't, or that a vine is in reach when it isn't. It's a problem so subtle that most players might not put their finger on why the game feels slightly off. I couldn't, and I've been playing platforms since my single-digit years.

The game suffers from a few smaller issues that add up to a larger problem. Namely, Donkey Kong Junior spans only four stages. Once you finish them, you cycle through them again and again until you run out of quarters or interest. (Seeing Mario die by falling from the top of the last stage to the ground with a halo above his head is a shock the first time it happens, though.)

Climbing, while the game's greatest strength, is a tad cumbersome. You've got to tap the joystick--or your d-pad, depending on how you play--to move not just from vine to vine, but to stretch out and grip an adjacent vine so Junior can climb or descend two at once. I'm not audacious enough to suggest a better method, but sometimes you'll know what you need to do but won't have the reflexes or wrist power to tap-tap-tap your way across vines to pull it off.

Donkey Kong Junior the Wii U of Nintendo's early platformers. Hey, I loved my Wii U! I'd put its first-party lineup against those of the Xbox One and PS4 any day of the week. It differed from the Wii… kind of. Not different enough. Same deal with Donkey Kong Junior. Its highs, namely figuring out what to do and pulling it off, are higher than Nintendo's and Shigeru Miyamoto's first success, but it lacks the freshness and easy-to-pick-up gameplay of its monolithic predecessor.

One More Thing

I'm a historian by nature, so I can't move on from Donkey Kong Junior without putting the game into a historical context. In short, Junior was almost as litigious as the first game, in which Nintendo became embroiled in a lawsuit filed by Universal Studios claiming Nintendo had ripped off the movie studio's King Kong character and concept.

The legal scuffle around Donkey Kong Junior isn't nearly as well known, probably because Nintendo would prefer to keep it buried. Through the '70s and '80s, a Japanese company called Ikegami Tsushinki manufactured arcade games for Nintendo. Ikegami and Nintendo signed an eight-game contract. Per the agreement, Ikegami would develop and manufacture arcade games, and Nintendo could pass them off as its own creations. The first title Ikegami's engineers made was Radar Scope, which took off in Japan but flopped in the United States. Left with a warehouse full of unsold hardware, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi ordered Nintendo of America president (and Yamauchi's son-in-law) Minoru Arakawa to come up with a new game to use all those cabinets and monitors.

From here, Nintendo's history diverges from actual history, as it often does. Nintendo touts Shigeru Miyamoto as the brain behind Donkey Kong, and that's true. He designed its characters, artwork, and gameplay, but he didn't program it. The onus for that fell on Ikegami, since it had the tech and knowhow to write games. Six of Ikegami's engineers--credited under the names Komonora, Iinuma Minoru, Nishida Mitsuhiro, Murata Yasuhiro, Shigeru Kudo and Kenzo Sekiguchi--followed Miyamoto's design and got the job done, and Ikegami sold Nintendo between 8,000 and 20,000 PCBs, the circuit board that plugs into arcade cabinets.

Back in the '80s, before publishers and developers publicized the programmers, artists, designers, and musicians behind their game, programmers had the habit of leaving signatures in the games they made. A secret room in Adventure for the Atari 2600 in which the sole programmer arranged colored blocks to spell out his name may be the most famous. Ikegami's engineers would engrave their names in the tile sets of some games, or leave a text message. In Donkey Kong, they wrote CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.

Nintendo made 80,000 copies of Donkey Kong's PCB without permission, likely to meet overwhelming demand for the game in Japan and the US. Here's where the story gets slippery. Donkey Kong was not part of the contract between Nintendo and Ikegami. I'm not exactly sure why, but my guess is because the game originated from Radar Scope. Whatever the reason, it slipped through the cracks, and because it wasn't explicitly named in that contract, Ikegami kept the game's source code. That's why Nintendo cloned the PCB board: Its developers had no other way to access the code that made Donkey Kong tick.

Donkey Kong's success moved Nintendo to call for a sequel. The problem was it had no way to make such a game in-house. Then and now, sequels often involved taking the first game's source code and repurposing it--adding new systems, new artwork, and so on--into a "new game." Think Zelda: Majora's Mask and every Call of Duty after 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Ha, ha! Just kidding! Mostly.) Rather than ask Ikegami to fulfill another game in its contract, Nintendo hired a contractor by the name of Hiroji Iwasaki to reverse-engineer Donkey Kong and work it into a follow-up. Shigeru Miyamoto crafted the game's design and got help from in-house artist and future Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto to finish up the artwork.

This process grants Donkey Kong Junior two distinctions: it was the first game made entirely in-house at Nintendo; and yet not entirely in-house, since Nintendo blatantly and unabashedly ripped off Ikegami's code to make it. Ikegami was less than pleased by this, as you'd expect, and sued Nintendo in 1983 for copyright infringement to the tune of 580,000,000 yen. Ikegami's basis for the lawsuit was that it owned the code for Donkey Kong, and yes, it totally did. The legal brawl lasted until 1990, when the companies settled out of court. No one knows the terms of the settlement, but another trial that same year concluded that Nintendo did not own the code for Donkey Kong.

Ikegami is still around as a manufacturer from equipment used in professional settings such as broadcast cameras and TV monitors. Its executives talk little about the company's work with Nintendo during those troubling early years. Perhaps because they would rather focus on more modern success stories, and/or because the terms of the settlement forbid it. Either way, Ikegami has unbreakable ties to Nintendo's success.

Score

Graphics: 4/5. Colorful and more varied than Donkey Kong's. The technology (or lack thereof) of the day worked in the game's favor: Platforms and vines stand out against the plain black backdrop, so there's never any confusion over where you should go or what you can climb.

Gameplay: 3/5. The puzzle-focused design sets Donkey Kong Junior apart from big daddy, but there are only four stages and the controls make navigating them less fun than figuring out how to navigate them.

Sound: 3/5. A few tunes and good effects such as the thunder-like boom of Junior landing on platforms. Nothing memorable aside from that, but all sounds serve the gameplay, and I'm all about that.

Overall: 3/5. Inventive but ultimately falls flat. If the controls were tighter, I'd probably prefer this over Donkey Kong.

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.      Donkey Kong Junior

5.      Jump Bug

6.      Space Panic

7.      Canyon Climber

8.      Crazy Climbers

References cited in this chapter:

• "Donkey Kong Jr. retrospective: Another vine mess | NES Works #020," Jeremy Parish, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcvxV91H1yI.
• "Q&A: Metroid Creator's Early 8-Bit Days at Nintendo," Wired, https://www.wired.com./2010/04/sakamoto/.
• "Feature: Shining A Light On Ikegami Tsushinki, The Company That Developed Donkey Kong," Nintendo Life, https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/02/feature_shining_a_light_on_ikegami_tsushinki_the_company_that_developed_donkey_kong.
• "Iwasaki," Game Developers Research Institute, http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Iwasaki.
• "Company:Ikegami Tsushinki," Game Developers Research Institute, http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Company:Ikegami_Tsushinki.

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 #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

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.