Platformer

Other acrobatic maneuvers may factor into the gameplay, such as swinging from vines or grappling hooks, jumping off walls, gliding through the air, or bouncing from springboards or trampolines.

Most games of this genre consist of multiple levels of increasing difficulty that may be interleaved by boss encounters, where the character has to defeat a particularly dangerous enemy to progress.

Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle was released on the ColecoVision that same year, adding uneven terrain and scrolling pans between static screens.

[35] The 1982 Apple II game Track Attack includes a scrolling platform level where the character runs and leaps along the top of a moving train.

's Quest For Tires (1983) put a recognizable character from American comic strips into side-scrolling, jumping gameplay similar to Moon Patrol.

It was bundled with Nintendo systems in North America, Japan, and Europe, and sold over 40 million copies, according to the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records.

That same year Jaleco released Esper Boukentai, a sequel to Psychic 5 that scrolled in all directions and allowed the player character to make huge multistory jumps to navigate the vertically oriented levels.

GamesRadar credits the "level select" feature of Mega Man as the basis for the non-linear mission structure found in most open-world, multi-mission, sidequest-heavy games.

[50] Another Capcom platformer that year was Bionic Commando, which popularized a grappling hook mechanic that has since appeared in dozens of games, including Earthworm Jim and Tomb Raider.

That same year, Capcom released Strider in arcades, which scrolled in multiple directions and allowed the player to summon artificial intelligence partners, such as a droid, tiger, and hawk, to help fight enemies.

[54] The following year, Takeru's Cocoron, a late platformer for the Famicom allowed players to build a character from a toy box filled with spare parts.

[55][56] Sonic showcased a new style of design made possible by a new generation of hardware: large stages that scrolled in all directions, curved hills, loops, and a physics system allowing players to rush through its levels with well-placed jumps and rolls.

In a break from the past, the Nintendo 64 had the fewest side scrolling platformers with only four; Yoshi's Story, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, Goemon's Great Adventure, and Mischief Makers—and most met with a tepid response from critics at the time.

An early example of this was Konami's Antarctic Adventure,[68] where the player controls a penguin in a forward-scrolling third-person perspective while having to jump over pits and obstacles.

[68][69][70] Originally released in 1983 for the MSX computer, it was subsequently ported to various platforms the following year,[70] including an arcade video game version,[68] NES,[70] and ColecoVision.

[76] The earliest example of a true 3D platformer is a French computer game called Alpha Waves, created by Christophe de Dinechin and published by Infogrames in 1990 for the Atari ST, Amiga, and IBM PC compatibles.

Their project, titled Sonic Xtreme, was to have featured a radically different approach for the series, with an exaggerated fisheye camera and multidirectional gameplay reminiscent of Bug!.

Examples include Rare's Conker's Bad Fur Day, Crystal Dynamics's Gex: Deep Cover Gecko and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, and Shiny Entertainment's Messiah.

Maximo was a spiritual heir to the Ghosts'n Goblins series, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg offered Yuji Naka's take on a Mario 64-influenced platformer, Argonaut Software returned with a new platformer named Malice, games such as Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair and Pitfall: The Lost Expedition were attempts to modernise classic video games of the 1980s using the 3D platformer genre, Psychonauts became a critical darling based on its imaginative levels and colorful characters, and several franchises that debuted during the sixth generation of consoles such as Tak, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, and Ape Escape each developed a cult following.

In 2008, LittleBigPlanet paired traditional 2D-platformer gameplay with physics simulation and user created content, earning it strong sales and good reviews.

The Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy for PlayStation 4 sold over 2.5 million copies in three months,[101] despite some critics noting it was harder than the original games.

[109] In 2014, Nintendo released Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker which uses compact level design and camera rotation in order to reach the goal and find secrets and collectibles.

[112] To achieve this realism, many cinematic platformers, beginning with Prince of Persia, have employed rotoscoping techniques to animate their characters based on video footage of live actors performing the same stunts.

[112] As these games tend to feature vulnerable characters who may die as the result of a single enemy attack or by falling a relatively short distance, they almost never have limited lives or continues.

These games were generally heavily focused on exploring indoor environments, usually a series of small rooms connected by doors, and have distinct adventure and puzzle elements.

[126][127][128][129][130][131] Early examples of free-roaming, side-scrolling, 2D platform-adventures in the vein of "Metroidvania" include Nintendo's Metroid in 1986 and Konami's Castlevania games: Vampire Killer in 1986[132][133][unreliable source?]

[140] Auto-runner games are platformers where the player-character is nearly always moving in one constant direction through the level, with less focus on tricky jumping but more on quick reflexes as obstacles appear on screen.

Game designer Scott Rogers named side-scrolling shooters like Scramble (1981) and Moon Patrol (1982) and chase-style gameplay in platformers like Disney's Aladdin (1994 8-bit version) and Crash Bandicoot (1996) as forerunners of the genre.

[143] While the concept thus was long known in Korea, journalists credit Canabalt (2009) as "the title that single-handedly invented the smartphone-friendly single-button running genre" and spawned a wave of clones.

[142][144] Fotonica (2011), a one-button endless runner viewed from the first person, that was described as a "hybrid of Canabalt's running, Mirror's Edge's perspective (and hands) and Rez's visual style".