Puggsy

Puggsy from 1993 is a platformer by Traveller's Tales, published by Psygnosis for the Sega Mega Drive. Puggsy, an orange alien, crash-lands on an unknown planet and has to win his ship back – not with weapons, but with objects he can pick up, carry and stack.

That object physics is what makes Puggsy remarkable. While the typical 1993 platformer was built on bouncing off enemies' heads, here you work out how a crate, a ball and other props can be assembled into a route to the exit. Every level is half hopscotch and half puzzle box – an approach that anticipated the physics-game fashion by a good decade.

For Traveller's Tales this was one of the studio's first major calling cards. On the Mega Drive it showed off the technical tricks it would later become famous for, and the partnership with Psygnosis – a label renowned for its visual standards – gave the game a strikingly handsome look, including a memorable underwater world.

The 16-bit era was overcrowded with mascots of every species, and among the hedgehogs and marsupials Puggsy sank commercially. The retro community has since dug it back into the light as one of the most inventive titles of its genre on the console.

Traveller's Tales even hid an ingenious copy-protection trick inside the game, still discussed among collectors today – pirated versions gave themselves away through their own behaviour. Stories of that kind illustrate how inventive the team was, and why Puggsy enjoys such a strong reputation among connoisseurs of the Mega Drive library despite its weak sales.

You can send the castaway home yourself – OldGame.cz serves Puggsy playable right in your browser.