Quick Step

Quick Step was published by Imagic for the Atari 2600 in 1983, and it resists any one-word genre label. You control a kangaroo hopping across a field of trampolines. The field scrolls downward, new trampolines appear at the top and old ones vanish at the bottom, and your job is to stamp as many of them as possible in your own colour.

The rule is simple and clever at once. A fresh trampoline arrives grey, which means it is not in play yet — land on it and you drop straight through. Once it turns pink it will hold you. Every bounce then recolours it to whoever landed: green for the kangaroo, blue for the squirrel. The squirrel is your rival and keeps diligently flipping them back. In two-player mode a second person takes the squirrel, and the whole thing changes character, because you stop chasing points and start chasing each other.

Three things kill you: dropping through a gap left by a vanished trampoline, landing on a grey one, and letting the scroll push you off the bottom edge. That last one matters most, because the playfield never stops shoving you downward. You cannot stand still and think, so you are permanently planning a landing two jumps ahead while climbing against the current, and the result is a pleasantly jittery tempo.

It is a small game even by 1983 standards. There is no progression and no level with a face of its own, just a gradual speed-up until you make a mistake. Alone against the computer it runs dry fairly quickly. With a second player, though, it is one of the better competitive things on the 2600 — short, readable, and built on a single rule you can immediately fight over.

Quick Step runs on oldgame.cz directly in the browser; there is nothing to install.