Rick Dangerous

You're in an Egyptian tomb and you have five seconds before a stone block crushes you. That opening scene in Rick Dangerous isn't just window dressing — it's the entire game in a nutshell. An uncompromising platformer from Microdeal in 1989 that looks like a laugh, but it's out to scramble your brain.

You play Rick, an explorer with one thing on his mind: survive and grab the treasure. From Egyptian tombs to Mayan temples to alien bases, you shuffle across the screen left and right, jump over chasms, shoot your pistol, and collect ammo. The goal is simple — reach the end of the level and take whatever you can get. Graphically it's nothing with grand ambitions, but craftsmanship is what matters: colorful blocks, pixel art in the style everyone knew back then.

Every single pixel here is a trap. You jump at a certain tempo, gravity doesn't negotiate — you're either exactly where you need to be or you're falling. Machines and hazards move by rigid patterns and wait for you to test them. You don't know the level, you don't know where to jump and where to shoot — you learn through failure. And you'll make plenty of them. The game won't teach you, certainly won't go easy on you — you're on your own here.

Rick Dangerous was the kind of game you wouldn't solve in ninety attempts without serious effort. It's the sentence you'd hear from your mates: "That one kills you." And they were right. Plenty of players found it in stores and realized that on an eighty-megabyte cartridge there was more game than they had patience for, especially one this proud and this unwilling to help.

Today Rick Dangerous feels more like an archaeology dig — fun that's historical rather than playable. Jumping around eight-bit maps belongs somewhere in the Stone Age of gaming. But that's exactly why, if you want to taste how games played without tutorials and without the game constantly telling you what to do — this dusty classic is the perfect step backward.