Platform Beginnings: An Idea with Legs - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 13

C H A P T E R 2
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Platform Beginnings:
An Idea with Legs
Not everyone agrees which game holds the honor of being the world's first platform game.
Nonetheless, it was certainly the arrival of Donkey Kong back in 1981 that popularized this classic
game genre and cemented many of its core mechanics. Mario (as he would later become known)
ran, jumped, and climbed ladders between platforms in order to avoid a whole range of hazards
and enemies. This seems to include all the key aspects we would expect to find in a platform
game today, so it could well have been the first platform game—or at least the first digital
platform game.
For real-world platform games have existed for thousands of years, and certainly long before
Mario ever entered the scene. You only need to look as far as a children's playground to see the
origins of this form of fun. You'll find plenty of platforms, ladders, slides, and swings—all of
which have been incorporated into the platform game genre. Children have been making their
own platform games for generations by jumping between tree stumps, walls, or anything else
they can find to balance on.
So platform games may not be such a recent invention at all. In fact, although physical play
of this kind is just something we do for fun, it has its origins in serious survival skills. Thousands
of years ago, our ability to jump and climb could easily have made the difference between finding
a meal and becoming one. That's why most animals develop their own survival skills through
similar kinds of physical play. So perhaps the first real-world platform game was actually played
by the very first animal to crawl out of the sea onto the land. Now there's an idea for a game....
A Fish Called Pod
Okay, so just for fun, let's base our first platform game example around one of these creatures.
The fossil record suggests that the first backboned animals that “walked” out of the oceans were
still very fish-like in appearance. Yet, they could breathe air and had articulated limb joints in
their flippers that enabled them to walk on solid ground. The official name for this group of
creatures is Tetrapodomorpha, which is not a very catchy name for a video game. Fortunately,
they also have the nickname “Fishapods,” so we will name our first character (and game) Fishpod
(see Figure 2-1).