Jumpman (MS-DOS)

Jumpman is a 1984 platformer released for MS-DOS by Epyx, and it remains one of the smartest things the genre produced in its early years. Someone has occupied the Earth colony headquarters on Jupiter and scattered bombs all over it; your job is to collect them, floor by floor, until the building is clean.

From the outside it looks like plenty of other ladders-and-platforms games, but Jumpman rests on two things that lift it well above the average. The first is the variety of its levels. There are thirty of them and almost every one has an idea of its own: robots wander and shoot at you, ropes carry you across gaps, platforms collapse the moment you step on them, and in a few cases the structure vanishes entirely and you have to remember where the route ran. The game happily stacks two dozen different situations next to each other and never overstays any of them.

The second thing is the falling. Jumpman does not stop at an edge and does not grab a ledge. Step wrong and he drops through several floors while you watch him tumble helplessly through the air. It is beautifully animated and utterly unforgiving: touching anything hostile or misjudging a jump means death, and lives disappear fast. Add the adjustable speed setting and hot-seat play for up to four people and you get a surprisingly good party game on a single machine.

What holds it back today is difficulty that never forgives and controls that demand pixel precision. Learning how Jumpman falls takes a while, and the first hour is mostly frustration. Pay that toll and you get one of the best designed platformers of its era, a game you can take one level at a time that never feels repetitive.

On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser, with nothing to install.