In a single-screen platformer there is nowhere to hide. Each level is one screen, drawn whole, with no scrolling: the ladders, the ledges, the enemies and the exit are all in view before the player moves. When CRASH surveyed the Spectrum’s “platform games” in March 1984, it described the type as games “all characterised by the need to climb ever higher either by jumping or climbing ladders and usually both”, and its favourite was Manic Miner, where “some platforms collapse when you tread on them, but forward planning lets you use these on your way back down to the portal”. Forward planning was the point. With the whole level in view, the player could work out a route before taking the first step, and then had to carry it out.
The form came first because it was the obvious way to show a building or a mine on one television screen. David Crane, whose Pitfall! broke away from it in 1982, remembered that “at the time I developed Pitfall!, most games were either single-screen games, or multiple-screen if they were top-down”. It lasted because a single screen made a good puzzle, a good place for two players to share, and a good thing for players to design themselves.
Fast facts
- What it is: a platform game in which each level fits on one fixed screen.
- Arcade beginnings: Space Panic (Universal, 1980), with ladders but no jump; Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981), four screens and a jump.
- On home computers: Miner 2049er (1982), Manic Miner (1983, twenty caverns), Lode Runner (1983, 150 screens and an editor).
- Two players at once: Mario Bros. (1983), Bubble Bobble (1986, 100 screens).
- Neighbours: flip-screen games such as Jet Set Willy, which join many single screens into one world; scrolling games such as Super Mario Bros..
Ladders and barrels
Electronic Games called the type “climbing games” in January 1983 and gave first place to Universal’s Space Panic: “That venerable grandfather of climbing videogames … was the first game to use the concept of scaling ladders.” Its spaceman climbs between the floors of a building and digs holes for the aliens to fall into. He cannot jump. The jump arrived with Donkey Kong, which the magazine called “the watershed climbing contest”. Its hero, Jumpman, later Mario, climbs a building site in four screens, each, Retro Gamer explains, “representing 25m of the total structure”, past rolling barrels, conveyor belts and lifts, to the last screen, where removing eight rivets drops the ape on his head. Then the four screens repeat, faster. The platformer entry tells the wider story.
Into the mines
On home computers the form became a series of levels, each with its own layout and its own trick. Retro Gamer names Bill Hogue’s Miner 2049er (1982), “a single-screen platformer with different levels”, as the game that influenced Matthew Smith’s Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy; its original version had ten screens. Smith himself told Personal Computer Games in 1984 that the idea for Manic Miner came from his partner Alan Maton, who suggested “a figure tunnelling down”, and that “their first thought for a name was Miner 49’er but … someone else got there just before them”.
Manic Miner had twenty caverns, each one screen, holding keys to collect, conveyor belts, crumbling floors and enemies moving on fixed paths. CRASH thought it “the best platform game around, in fact it’s probably the best arcade game for the Spectrum”, and the same 1984 round-up shows how crowded the form already was: Imagine’s Jumping Jack, in which the player jumps through gaps in a stack of lines; Ocean’s Digger Dan, “only one screen and speed”; and Blaby’s Barmy Burgers, with four platforms and a chef pursued by an egg and two sausages.
A screen as a puzzle
A single screen also made a good puzzle. Doug Smith’s Lode Runner (Broderbund, 1983) asked the player to collect every piece of gold on a screen of bricks, ladders and bars, digging holes to trap the guards, and it came with “150 different sets of scaffolding and ladders”, Computer Gaming World reported. It also came with an editor, so that players could build screens of their own: “perhaps the easiest game creator I have ever seen”, the reviewer wrote, with a data disk that had “room for 150 more”. A level that fits on one screen is small enough for anyone to design, test and swap with friends.
Two players on one screen
The single screen also suited two people. Nintendo’s Mario Bros. (1983) put Mario and Luigi on the same screen of platforms, working together or against each other, and let them flip enemies over by bumping the platform beneath them. Retro Gamer argues that its “cooperative/competitive gameplay” was “later improved upon by Taito with its Bubble Bobble series”. Fukio Mitsuji’s Bubble Bobble (1986) sent two dinosaurs through 100 single screens, trapping monsters in bubbles and bursting them, and kept its best ending for two players who finished together. “Taito’s single-screen platformer is legendary,” Retro Gamer wrote in 2004.
Other arcade makers kept the format into the 1990s. Computer & Video Games described Mitchell’s Tumble Pop in 1992 as “a one or two-player single screen platform game”, the third in a line that began with Pang. On the Amiga, Team17’s Qwak (1993), originally a BBC Micro game by Jamie Woodhouse, was, in Retro Gamer’s words, “a highly addictive single-screen platformer in the same vein as Taito’s Bubble Bobble”.
Leaving the single screen
Scrolling and flip-screen games took over as the machines grew. Pitfall! joined its jungle screens edge to edge, and Jet Set Willy (1984) turned Manic Miner’s single screens into the 60 rooms of a mansion that the player could explore in any order. James Higgins, who programmed The Addams Family, told Retro Gamer that in the 16-bit generation “the systems had more power/resources allowing developers to break free from the single screen game and start to scroll stuff around. In a sense it was a natural evolution of platform game design”, just as shooting games had gone from Space Invaders to the scrolling landscapes of Scramble. The software scrolling entry explains why scrolling cost Spectrum programmers so much effort.
The form never went away. Night Knight, a game for the ZX Spectrum Next based on an MSX game by Juan J. Martinez, is in the words of a 2025 guide to the machine’s games “a single-screen platform game”: the knight Sir Bernard must step on every tile of each room, turning it a different colour, before a key appears and the door to the next room opens, across 80 rooms.
Sources
- Electronic Games, January 1983, pp. 50–55, “Climbing games”: Space Panic as the first ladder-climbing game; Donkey Kong as “the watershed climbing contest”.
- CRASH issue 2, March 1984, p. 54: “Platform games” round-up (the definition, Manic Miner and its collapsing platforms, Jumping Jack, Digger Dan, Barmy Burgers).
- Retro Gamer issue 114, May 2013, pp. 66–73, “What happened to the platformer?”: the timeline (Space Panic 1980, Donkey Kong 1981, Miner 2049er 1982 with ten screens); Miner 2049er’s influence on Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy; Mario Bros. and Bubble Bobble; David Crane on single-screen games (p. 69); James Higgins on leaving the single screen (p. 71).
- “The history of Donkey Kong”, Retro Gamer issue 43, 2007, from p. 24: the four stages of 25 metres, the rivets, the repeating loop.
- Peter Conner, profile of Matthew Smith, Personal Computer Games issue 4, March 1984, pp. 29–31: Alan Maton’s idea and the name Miner 49’er.
- PC Zone issue 107, October 2001: Manic Miner’s “20 simple yet infuriatingly designed levels”, as cited in the Manic Miner entry.
- John Besnard, review of Lode Runner, Computer Gaming World vol. 3 no. 5, September 1983, pp. 19–20: 150 screens, the game creator, room for 150 more.
- Retro Gamer issue 8, 2004, pp. 36–39, and Your Sinclair issue 22, October 1987: Bubble Bobble’s 100 screens and two-player ending, as cited in the Bubble Bobble entry. Retro Gamer issue 4, 2004, p. 18: “Taito’s single-screen platformer is legendary”.
- Computer & Video Games issue 123, February 1992, p. 88: Tumble Pop.
- Retro Gamer issue 21, 2005, p. 64: Team17 retrospective, Qwak.
- Personal Computer Games issue 6, May 1984, pp. 72–74: Jet Set Willy’s 60 locations, as cited in the Jet Set Willy entry.
- ZX Dreams Next (Fusion Retro Books, 2025), pp. 36–37: Night Knight.