Flicky

Flicky began life as a 1984 arcade machine, and what you play here is the Sega Mega Drive conversion that arrived several years later. It is one of Sega's first major arcade hits, and plenty of people today know it indirectly: the blue bird Flicky went on to become a recurring character in the Sonic games.

The principle is simple and clever. Each round is a multi-storey building whose floors you run across, with baby birds scattered through the rooms. Reach one and it falls in behind you, trotting along in a line at your heels. Your job is to lead them to the exit, and the more of them you deliver at once, the larger the bonus.

The catch is that the line is fragile. Cats and lizards prowl the building, and when one barges into your procession the chicks scatter across the whole floor and you start gathering them again. You do have defences — flowerpots, cups and hammers lie around to be thrown at pursuers — but only as many as you can find. More important still is the handling. Flicky builds up momentum as he runs and loses part of his control mid-jump, so every hop between floors has to be judged in advance.

That is exactly where the tension lives. The safe route is escorting chicks one at a time, which pays almost nothing. The tempting route is collecting the whole line and threading it past the cats to the door, and a single mistake undoes it. That decision recurs every round and never quite goes stale.

It is a short arcade game with no story, and after ten or fifteen rounds it starts repeating itself; anyone expecting scale will be disappointed. As a demonstration of perfectly clean design, though, it still works. Flicky runs directly in the browser on oldgame.cz.