Astro Boy

Astro Boy is a 2004 game credited to Sonic Team. The character it draws on is a robot boy from a Japanese comic and animated series with roots in the 1950s, which explains the rounded art style carried over from the source.

The data on this entry calls for caution. The catalogue lists MS-DOS / PC as the platform and first-person as the perspective, yet a 2004 game from a Japanese console studio was an action title for a home console. Both fields therefore look like general classifications rather than precise descriptions - a common situation in catalogue records.

Sonic Team is a name associated with fast action and strong colour. Building a game around a character who flies and carries a robot's equipment fits that signature well: moving through the air as well as along the ground gives levels a different shape from an ordinary platformer.

2004 was a period when licensed games based on animated series were produced in quantity and their quality varied wildly. What usually made the difference was whether an established studio stood behind one or a team had been assembled purely to hit a deadline.

A character with this much history is also a cataloguing problem in itself. Games based on it have appeared across several decades and platforms, often sharing the same short title, so the name alone identifies almost nothing. Year, studio and platform together are what pin an entry down - and when one of those fields is unreliable, the identification loosens accordingly.

OldGame.cz keeps the release year, the studio and screenshots on file for Astro Boy; playing it in the browser is not something this entry includes.