Platform Games

Introduction

Taking control of characters and navigating through hostile environments is great fun. You have to jump over spikes and zappers, dodge falling rocks and icicles, sprint across lava traps, climb slippery slopes, bounce into the air from a springboard, and even swim through water hazards before you run out of air. Platforms shift and disappear, enemies patrol areas and hurl projectiles, and you need perfect timing to avoid plunging off the screen to your doom.

There is always something to collect on your adventure, such as coins, rings and keys. It’s also exciting to find a mystery box or a loot crate with a power-up or weapon inside.

Keep improving your skills because the level of difficulty increases as you work through distinct stages or worlds before you fight the final boss.

In his analysis of cinema, Steve Neale defined genre as the “specific variation of the interplay of codes”. Platform games often rely on straightforward narrative structures, archetypical characters, scoring systems, items, looped music, and time limits. Let’s take a look at these elements in more detail.

The Climbing Game

A good place to start exploring the genre is Donkey Kong (1981). Developed and published by Nintendo, this iconic game follows Jumpman and his attempts to save his girlfriend from the eponymous Donkey Kong. Set on a construction site, the first level features crooked girders and fast rolling barrels. As the game progresses, the levels become increasingly complex and the hazards, such as the fiery sprites, move quicker.

Donkey Kong helped establish various elements players expect to see in a platform game.

The Narrative of Platformers

Donkey Kong is driven by action codes with the character leaping across platforms, defeating enemies, climbing ladders and rescuing the damsel in distress. The game’s designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, called the style “athletic”. Acrobatic gameplay is one of the most important conventions of platformers.

The game opens with the disruption – Donkey Kong kidnapping your girlfriend. The drama is reinforced by unsettling music and sound effects. Although the producers were limited to the technology available in the early 1980s, there is no need for an elaborate set up because players want to play. In other words, the disequilibrium is central to the success of the genre. You need to release the rivets holding the girders and defeat the beast to establish a new equilibrium. This clear progression in the story evokes a tremendous sense of satisfaction, especially when you are rewarded with the uplifting music and the signifier of the heart at the end of the sequence.

Of course, the game keeps rotating through the levels because the producers want players spending more money in the arcade competing for the highest score and their name at the top of the leader board.

Another trope of platform games is the damsel in distress. Our hero, Jumpman, is on a quest to rescue his girlfriend who has been kidnapped by the villain. Since the games focus on action, it makes sense that platformers rely on archetypical characters, such as those defined by Vladmir Propp.

It is also worth thinking about the function of “magical objects” that are used to defeat the villain. Jumpman does use a hammer to smash the barrels, but other platformers make the items more integral to resolution of the game.

Representation

The graphics might seem basic to the modern player, but Donkey Kong uses pixels effectively to construct characters. The producers position the audience to fear the antagonist by exaggerating his size and strength. During the game, Donkey Kong bares his teeth and raises his fist in anger. He is the monster that needs to be defeated.

By contrast, Jumpman is a combination of red and blue – colours often used for comic book heroes. The overalls and cap suggest the protagonist is an everyman character, inviting the player to see themselves in the role.

The simple binary opposition between good and evil in platform games makes the narratives more accessible, especially for younger audiences who will appreciate the motivation of the characters.

The damsel in distress is called Pauline. The designers used fair hair and a pink dress to encode her femininity. She also cries out for help during the game.

Critics argue this sort of characterisation reinforces outdated gender roles where women needed to be saved rather than being active participants in the narrative. Pauline is simply a plot device used to provoke the hero into action. At least Donkey Kong hurls barrels.

Many early platformers relied on this trope. However, modern games have moved toward more balanced storytelling and offering more inclusive gaming experiences.

Finally, when the barrels reach the oil drum at the bottom of the screen, they burst into flames and become Fireballs that bounce along the platform. There are also Fire Foxes that patrol the ladders and block your path to the top. These enemies transform from a hot orange to a cool blue to signify they can be destroyed by the hammer. Smashing the enemies with a hammer is violent, but it is fantasy violence and more acceptable to the audience and regulators.

High Scores

Points systems are another important code of platform games. In Donkey Kong, you are rewarded with 100 points each time you jump over one of the barrels. Defeating enemies with the hammer could get you as much as 800 points. Points are also awarded for other interactions in the game.

We have already mentioned how points introduce a competitive element to the game. They also give positive feedback each time an action is completed. This encourages players to take harder paths and attempt tricker jumps to increase their score, adding to the thrill of navigating your way through the levels.

Collecting Items

The hammer in Donkey Kong serves several functions. Similar to the accumulation of points, grabbing the hammer provides a sense of achievement and motivates players to explore levels more thoroughly. It also adds variety to the gameplay, so you are not just dodging barrels and baddies as you try to climb to the top of the screen.

Collecting items remains part of the platformer experience with more complex games using items to give players new abilities and extra lives, power-ups, and advance to the next level.

Looped Music

Composed by Yukio Kaneoka, the background music for the levels in Donkey Kong consists of five notes looped over and over again until you collect the hammer or reach the top girder. The tempo matches the pace of Jumpman and draws the player into the action. Early platform games had limited space for audio data, so short, looped tracks were necessary to conserve memory. It also made sense to loop the five beeps because there was no telling how long it would take players to complete the level.

Although the scores for recent platform games are more sophisticated and even adapt in real time to the character interacting with the environment, most still rely on the looped soundtrack.

Time Limits

Platform games often use time limits to create a sense of urgency and push players to move quickly. Instead of a countdown timer, Donkey Kong displays a bonus score at the top of screen. When the value reaches zero, Jumpman loses a life, and you have to restart the level.

The pressure to complete the level within a set time limit adds to the excitement of the game.

Limited Lives

Players start the game with three lives. You will lose a life if you are hit by a barrel, caught by the fire enemies, or fail to complete the level on time. Limiting the number of lives available increases the pressure on players to perform and leads to a greater sense of achievement when you manage to defeat the villain and rescue Pauline.

Once the lives were lost, players had to insert more coins into the slot to continue.

Companies involved in the cultural industries are driven by profit. Donkey Kong was created for amusement arcades, so the developers also used the lives mechanic to force players to keep spending money.

Some platformers use extra lives as rewards for good performance. This adds another layer of strategy – do you explore hidden areas and take risks to gain additional lives.

The Joystick and Buttons

Although Donkey Kong used a two-axis joystick, the movement was limited to four directions: left, right, up and down. Only one button was need for the character to jump over obstacles. Better processing power enabled developers to add diagonal movement and more fluid control of the characters. The “athletic” games quickly became more acrobatic.

Screen Scrollers

Donkey Kong is a single screen game. The introduction of screen scrolling significantly advanced platform game design because it allowed for larger and more immersive experiences. Basic side scrollers were already in development when Donkey Kong was first released, but one of the most colourful and fun examples from the era was Pac-Land (1984).

You can really see how quickly the graphics and gameplay were developing in the early 1980s, especially the smoothness of the camera and the use of parallax scrolling where background layers move at different speeds to create a sense of depth.

Another interesting example is Kid Icarus (1986). Released in Japan on Nintendo’s Family Computer Disk System, the game features vertical scrolling with players having to move upwards through the Underworld and Skyworld stages in their search for the sacred treasures.

The developers were able to take advantage of the console’s floppy disk memory system which had three times the storage capacity of the cartridges available at the time. It meant players could enjoy incredible platform games from the comfort of their own homes rather than the traditional arcades.

Wonder Boy

Platform games are an interplay between simple narratives with battles between the forces of good and evil, archetypical characters, looped music, and design elements that provoke excitement and tension from the players. Although the arcade version was unnecessarily difficult, it’s easy to argue Super Mario Bros. (1985) perfected the genre in the 1980s. However, we are opting for Sega’s Wonder Boy (1986):

In terms of narrative, the protagonist has to navigate through different levels to rescue his girlfriend from the dark king. The representation of the blond-haired skateboarder positions the player to sympathise with the hero and engage with his quest.

The gameplay is relentlessly intense, making each level feel incredibly challenging and exciting. There are also plenty of secret items to uncover. Just avoid the god of death! The vitality meter adds further pressure to race through the obstacles, so you certainly breathe a huge sigh of relief when you reach the goal at the end of each round.

The music is wonderfully infectious and perfectly matches the pace of the action.

What makes Wonder Boy so special is the controls because you really felt connected to the character. You might have to hold down the axe button on the panel and push the joystick forward to accelerate your movement enough to make a long jump and then suddenly pull back on the joystick to slow down before you crash into a rock. Jumping and timing the hatchet throws to kill an enemy was also difficult but rewarding. The constant shifting of the joystick and the careful pressing and holding of the two buttons was tremendous fun.

It was also expensive. You had to fill the machine with hundreds of coins to master the rhythms of each environment and not many players made it to the end to see the game over screen.

3D Platformers

Instead of side-scrolling gameplay, these new platformers allowed players to move in all directions within fully realised three-dimensional spaces. The two-axis joysticks were replaced by analog sticks that offered precise 360-degree character and camera control. Light tilts of the stick often resulted in slow movements whereas full tilts enabled faster movements, making the connection between the player and character more natural and immersive.

A good example of this new freedom is the groundbreaking Super Mario 64 (1996). Have a look at the trailer for the game:

These new interactive worlds helped rejuvenate the genre in the mid-1990s.

Final Thoughts

Platform games are a fundamental part of gaming’s history. From the early days of Donkey Kong to the revolutionary leap into 3D with Super Mario 64, platformers have remained one of the most enduring and influential genres. Perhaps the resurgence of arcade culture might allow some players to experience these classic titles in all their cabinet glory rather than on a flat screen in their living rooms.

Although the market share market share of 15% in 1998 has fallen substantially, the games are still finding success with each new generation of players, especially in hybrid forms such as Ori and the Blind Forest (2015) and Hollow Knight (2017) which mix a platform mode with adventure gameplay. The genre will always appeal to independent developers because the games require fewer resources than more complex forms and can be distributed digitally on the likes of Steam and Ninetendo eShop without a major publisher. The next innovation is only a jump away.