The game usually named as the first platformer has no jump button. In Universal’s Space Panic (1980) a spaceman climbs ladders between the floors of a building and digs holes for the aliens chasing him to fall into. A year later Nintendo’s Donkey Kong gave its hero a leap over rolling barrels, and the form took off: a character seen from the side, a screen of ledges, and the player’s timing as the whole game. American magazines called these “climbing games”. By early 1984 British ones were calling them “platform games”, and the name stuck. Over the next fifteen years the genre filled home computers, sold consoles and gave two companies their mascots, and when games went 3D, Super Mario 64 showed them how to move.
Fast facts
- The idea: get across a level, mainly by running, climbing and jumping between platforms, while avoiding hazards and enemies.
- Before the jump: Space Panic (Universal, 1980) and Crazy Climber (Nichibutsu, 1980), both without a jump button.
- The template: Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981).
- Scrolling: Jump Bug (1981), Pitfall! (1982, flip-screen), Pac-Land (1984), Super Mario Bros. (1985).
- In 3D: Super Mario 64 (1996), Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider the same year.
- Revival: independent games such as Braid, Super Meat Boy, Spelunky and Celeste.
Ladders first
Electronic Games traced the genre’s history in January 1983, when “climbing contests” had become, it said, “one of the major genres in the videogame universe”. It gave the first place to Space Panic, “that venerable grandfather of climbing videogames”, which “was the first game to use the concept of scaling ladders”. Players moved from level to level on ladders, armed with a shovel, and trapped the “apple-like space creatures” chasing them in the holes they dug. The game never became the hit the magazine thought it deserved, but it kept “a cult following”.
Retro Gamer’s 2013 history of the platformer points out the problem with calling it the first: its hero cannot jump. Nichibutsu’s Crazy Climber (1980), in which the player hauls a climber up the face of a building, had no jump either. Retro Gamer found the first jumping character earlier still, in Frogs (1978), which is not a platform game at all.
The jump arrived in Donkey Kong, which Nintendo released in July 1981. Its carpenter, Jumpman, later named Mario, climbs a building site, leaps the barrels the ape rolls at him and swings a hammer. For Electronic Games it was “the watershed climbing contest”, as Pac-Man had been for maze games. Retro Gamer judged it “probably the first platformer to contain all the core elements”: getting from one point to another, a power-up (the hammer), stages with their own themes and “a sort-of boss battle” at the end. Other magazines reached for other words. Video Games in 1982 grouped it with Frogger as games more like “obstacle courses than mazes, since you always know where you’re going—up.”
“The platform games”
In Britain the name came from the Spectrum. When CRASH rounded up Spectrum platform games in early 1984, it explained that “Kong games are perhaps the best known of the platform games, but there are quite a few other types”. Its choice was Manic Miner: “This is the best platform game around, in fact it’s probably the best arcade game for the Spectrum.” The same issue said Chuckie Egg had added to “the mythology of the Platform Game”.
Retro Gamer traces Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy back to Bill Hogue’s Miner 2049er (1982), a single-screen platformer with a series of different levels. These home computer games kept the single screen of Donkey Kong and filled it with conveyor belts, crumbling floors and enemies on fixed paths, and they put the whole challenge in the player’s timing. The single-screen platformer entry covers them in more detail.
Leaving the single screen
Two games of 1981 and 1982 took the platformer beyond one screen. Jump Bug, released a few months after Donkey Kong, is “deemed by many”, Retro Gamer says, to be the first side-scrolling platformer. David Crane’s Pitfall! (Activision, 1982) for the Atari 2600 was more influential. Its jungle was 255 screens joined edge to edge, which the player could explore at their own pace, and Crane generated every screen from a formula because the cartridge could not store them. Crane told Retro Gamer that the side view came first: a person “doesn’t look much like a person from the top”, and once he chose to show Pitfall Harry from the side, “it was only logical to do a cutaway view of the world. This made for natural ‘platforms’.”
Nintendo’s Mario Bros. (1983) stayed on one screen but let two players work together, or against each other, and let them knock enemies over by bumping the platform beneath them, a move Super Mario Bros. kept. Namco’s Pac-Land (1984) had scrolling, colourful stages and power-ups almost a year before Nintendo’s game.
Super Mario Bros. (1985) is the game that set the pattern. Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka drew every level on paper, and the first one teaches the rules without a word of instruction: the first enemy dies when Mario lands on it, and the first question-mark block is just above. The whole game fitted into 40 kilobytes. After it came scrolling action platformers such as Mega Man, Castlevania and Capcom’s Ghosts ’n Goblins, which Retro Gamer remembers for its gothic look and “one of the hardest first stages in a videogame”. Capcom’s Bionic Commando (1987) dropped the jump altogether in favour of a grappling hook, and Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia (1989) made animation the point, leading to the “cinematic” platformers such as Another World.
Mascots and console wars
Nintendo packed Super Mario Bros. with the NES, and Retro Gamer argues that this taught the industry that a platform game could sell a console. In the 16-bit years the genre was at its height. Sega answered Mario with Sonic the Hedgehog (1991), and the two characters carried the rivalry between the companies (see Sega vs Nintendo). Retro Gamer lists the Mega Drive’s three best-selling games as Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2 and Disney’s Aladdin, and the Super Nintendo’s top two as Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country, all platformers.
Everyone else wanted a mascot too, which meant a long line of cartoon animals, some good and many not. Advertisers joined in: Zool promoted Chupa Chups lollies, and Cool Spot was the 7 Up mascot. Puzzle games borrowed the form, most successfully DMA Design’s Lemmings (1991).
Into 3D
Super Mario 64 came out with the Nintendo 64 in June 1996. It gave Mario an analogue stick to tiptoe, walk or run with, and open courses to explore instead of a path from left to right. The same year brought Naughty Dog’s Crash Bandicoot and Core Design’s Tomb Raider. Designers now had to think about the camera and about judging distance on a flat screen. Gregg Mayles, who designed Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie, told Retro Gamer that the hardest problem was letting the player “judge height and distance accuracy”, like “walking around in the real world with one eye closed”.
Imitators followed. In May 1998 Edge observed that “it seems a Mario 64 ‘tribute’ arrives almost as regularly” as P. T. Barnum’s suckers were born, and listed several then in development, Banjo-Kazooie among them. By the end of the decade, Retro Gamer argues, the genre was losing its hold. The best-selling PlayStation games were Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy VII, and GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 had shown console players what a first-person shooter could be. Mayles saw Super Mario 64’s influence spreading anyway: “Any game where you fully interact with a 3D background … can trace its roots back to Mario 64.”
The revival
Independent developers brought the 2D platformer back. In 2010 Edge called Team Meat’s Super Meat Boy “a curious beast: the contemporary retro game”, which had begun as a Flash game in 2008 and had its origins in Mega Man and Super Mario Bros. By 2013 Retro Gamer could name Braid, Super Meat Boy and Spelunky as proof that the genre was “very much alive and jumping”, alongside Nintendo’s own Super Mario Galaxy and Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet.
Matt Thorson and Noel Berry’s Celeste (2018) started as a four-day game jam entry for the PICO-8 fantasy console, a deliberately limited modern system with a 128×128 screen and 16 colours. Wireframe counted the finished game among the best independent games of 2018, “a challenging and unexpectedly moving fable about mental health”. Exploration platformers had their own revival, told in the Metroidvania entry.
Kinds of platformer
- Single-screen: the whole level on one screen, as in Donkey Kong, Manic Miner and Bubble Bobble. See single-screen platformer.
- Scrolling action: fighting as much as jumping, as in Ghosts ’n Goblins, Ghouls ’n Ghosts and Mega Man.
- Cinematic: realistic animation and deliberate movement, as in Prince of Persia and Another World.
- Exploration: one connected world opened up by new abilities; see Metroidvania.
- Puzzle: platforms as a setting for problems, as in Lemmings.
- 3D: open courses and a moving camera, as in Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie.
Building one
A platformer asks a lot of its hardware: a moving world, characters that must be drawn over it, and the exact moment a foot meets a ledge. Machines with hardware scrolling, such as the NES, C64 and Amiga, could move the whole screen with a register write; on the Spectrum the program had to move every byte itself, which is why smooth software scrolling was news there. Levels were built from tile maps, which also made tile collision a cheap way to decide where a character could stand. Super Mario Bros. kept its score bar still while the world scrolled below it with a trick of the NES picture chip, described in the PPU entry.
Sources
- Electronic Games, January 1983, pp. 50–55, “Climbing games”: the genre and Space Panic; Donkey Kong as “the watershed climbing contest”; Crazy Climber.
- Retro Gamer issue 114, May 2013, pp. 66–73, “What happened to the platformer?”: Space Panic (1980) and the missing jump; Frogs (1978), Crazy Climber (1980), Donkey Kong (1981), Jump Bug (1981), Pitfall! (1982), Miner 2049er (1982) and its influence on Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy; Mario Bros., Pac-Land, Ghosts ’n Goblins, Bionic Commando, Prince of Persia; the pack-in and the 16-bit console war; best-selling Mega Drive and Super Nintendo games; advertising platformers and Lemmings; Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider in 1996; the late-1990s decline and GoldenEye; Super Mario Galaxy, LittleBigPlanet, Braid, Super Meat Boy and Spelunky. Interviews with David Crane (p. 69) and Gregg Mayles (p. 73).
- Video Games volume 1 issue 1, August 1982: Donkey Kong and Frogger as “obstacle courses”, as cited in the Donkey Kong entry, which also gives the July 1981 release.
- CRASH issue 2, March 1984, p. 54: “Platform games” round-up (Manic Miner, “Kong games”); p. 14: Chuckie Egg and “the mythology of the Platform Game”.
- Edge issue 58, May 1998, p. 35: Space Circus preview and the “Mario 64 ‘tribute’”.
- Edge issue 222, Christmas 2010, p. 103: Super Meat Boy review.
- Wireframe issue 12, April 2019, p. 20: Celeste and PICO-8. Issue 30, January 2020, p. 24: Celeste among the games of 2018.
- For Pitfall!, Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario 64 and Donkey Kong Country, see those entries and their citations.