Fast Eddie

Fast Eddie was released by Sirius Software in 1982, and it belongs to the very first wave of platform games — the ones made before the genre had settled on any rules. The playfield is a single screen: a four-storey building linked by ladders, with enemies patrolling the floors while your little figure climbs up and down collecting the nine items that appear on the levels.

Everything rests on the jump. Eddie can walk left and right, climb a ladder and hop, and the hop is your only defence against the creatures shuttling back and forth along each floor. You cannot kill them, you cannot slip past them, you can only clear them at exactly the right moment. Once all nine items are yours, the way opens to the final prize at the top, guarded by a large sneaker; jump it and the round is over, and the next one starts a little faster and a little busier.

It plays better than its age suggests. The controls are instant and readable, the jump arc is short, and the whole thing is built around learning the rhythm of the patrols rather than reacting to surprises. The difficulty curve is pure 1982: more enemies, more speed, no new ideas. After a few rounds you have seen everything the game knows how to do, and from then on you are only finding out how long you last.

That is also its ceiling. There are no designed stages, no power-ups, no change of scenery — it is a one-move arcade drill, good for ten minutes and for comparing scores, not for an evening. What it does offer is an honest look at what action games on home machines were like before the big multi-screen platformers arrived. It started life on the Atari 2600 and reached the Commodore 64 the same year.

On oldgame.cz Fast Eddie runs directly in the browser, with nothing to download or configure.