Pink Goes to Hollywood

This licensed Pink Panther platformer arrived on the Sega Mega Drive in 1993, published by TecMagik. It lands in the middle of the console's peak years, at a moment when the market was saturated with platform games starring cartoon characters. After Sonic, every publisher wanted a mascot, and a television licence was the fastest route to one.

The Pink Panther brings a real advantage to the format. The character is visually unmistakable and the humour works through movement rather than dialogue, which translates into sprite animation far better than most licences manage. The Hollywood premise also lets the game shift settings by film genre, which conveniently solves one of the recurring problems of platformers from this era, namely how to keep the scenery from becoming repetitive across a whole game.

The Mega Drive was well suited to the genre, but the competition was brutal. By 1993 there were platformers with meticulously tuned animation and controls polished to a fine degree. Licensed titles met that standard unevenly, and the difference between a solid platformer and a mediocre one came down to character momentum, jump precision and whether you land where you actually aimed.

This is a single-player game in a side view, a conventional take on the genre rather than an experimental one. It runs directly in the browser on OldGame.cz, so a single level tells you the thing that matters most: whether the movement is precise enough to make jumping enjoyable, or whether you will spend the game arguing with the controls.