Crazy Climber

Crazy Climber is a 1980 arcade action game produced by Nichibutsu?, in which the player guides a stunt climber up the faces of four skyscrapers while avoiding falling objects and other hazards.¹⁶¹⁴ It was developed under contract by the Tokyo software house Jorudan? and released in North America by Taito? America Corporation.¹¹¹⁹ The game is remembered chiefly for its unusual control scheme: two 8-way joysticks, one for the climber’s left hand and one for the right, so that the player’s own arm motions correspond directly to the climber’s.¹⁶¹⁸ It ranks among Nichibutsu’s most acclaimed titles.¹³

The player takes the role of a “human fly” who must scale four buildings, each named after a Nichibutsu company — Nichibutsu, Nichibutsu Leisure, Nichibutsu U.K. Ltd., and Nichibutsu U.S.A. Corp. — and reach the roof of each to be carried off by a waiting helicopter.¹⁶ The buildings are each 200 stories high, and the climber can move up and sideways but never down.¹⁶ Windows open and close along the building faces, and if a window closes on both of the climber’s hands he loses his grip and falls.¹⁶¹³ Additional dangers include bald-headed residents (dubbed “Mad Doctors”) who hurl flower pots, tin cans, bottles, fruit, and buckets of water; a giant condor that drops eggs and excrement; a King Kong–styled giant ape that pounds the windows; falling steel girders and iron dumbbells; live wires protruding from electric signs; and falling “Crazy Climber” signs.¹³¹⁶ Not every hazard appears on every building: the condor is absent from the third building, the ape leaps only on the first and third, and the falling “Crazy Climber” signs appear only on the third and fourth.¹⁶ Many hazards are announced by recognizable musical themes.¹⁶

A pink “Lucky Balloon” can carry the climber upward about eight to ten stories if grabbed, dropping him at a window that may itself be about to close.¹³¹⁶ When the climber nears the roof of the fourth building, it splits into two separate towers, each with only two columns of windows to scale.¹⁶ If a climber succumbs to a hazard, a replacement appears at the same spot, and the danger that felled him is removed so the next climber can continue.¹³¹⁶

The game awards points per story climbed — 100 on the first building, 150 on the second, 200 on the third, and 250 on the fourth — plus a bonus for each rooftop reached that decays every ten seconds, so a fast ascent is rewarded.¹⁶ The rooftop bonus rises from 10,000 points on the first building to 40,000 on the fourth.¹⁶ Each player starts with three climbers and earns an extra at 30,000 points; completing all four buildings returns the player to the first, with increased difficulty and the score retained.¹⁶¹³ The waiting helicopter lingers only about thirty seconds before flying off.¹⁶ According to the arcade cabinet documentation, an idle climber prompts a digitized voice to encourage the player to “Go for it!”.¹⁶ One documented feature adjusted a game’s difficulty according to the skill of previous players.¹³ The cabinet came in upright, cabaret/mini, and cocktail-table forms, including distinct Taito and Nichibutsu Deluxe uprights, with a horizontal color raster monitor and amplified mono sound.¹⁷¹⁶

Development

Crazy Climber was Jorudan’s second game for Nichibutsu, following the shooter Moon Cresta? (1980).¹¹ Jorudan — founded in 1979 as Jorudan Information Service and later known for its Norikae Annai transit-routing software — had entered arcade development as an unbranded subcontractor after its president, Toshikazu Sato, was asked to build an original title amid the Space Invaders? boom; its work went uncredited for years.¹¹⁷ Its very first game had been the topology-inspired racer Rolling Crash (1979), also for Nichibutsu.¹¹ Sato recalled that the Crazy Climber concept originated at Nichibutsu, and that the two-joystick control idea probably came from Nichibutsu’s staff member Kijima; the detailed mechanics were worked out by Jorudan’s programmer Mitsuo Honda.⁷ Sato said the game was made on a budget of eight million yen over roughly five months, with staff sleeping on bunk beds at the office.⁷

The unusual “horizontal screen, vertical scroll” layout departed from the vertically oriented displays typical of Nichibutsu’s other titles of the era.⁷ Odaba Kyoji, a sub-programmer under Honda, described an internal endurance system in which the climber and each falling object carried a weight value, so lighter objects could be survived and endurance recovered by bracing at a window; timing quirks in the game’s task-switching, an early form of multitasking, produced bugs that sometimes let a player survive a hit that should have been fatal.⁷ An early design called for flames rising from the base of the building, an idea dropped as objectionable, and a “Happy Gondra” element that appeared on overseas flyers never made it into the game.⁷ The arcade version shipped with four stages, though ROM analysis later revealed data for eight; the extra stages, which were fully playable, were abandoned near the deadline over an unfixable bug and to save on ROM cost.⁷ Sato had a hidden “JORDAN.LTD” credit inserted into the game as an unauthorized signature, undisclosed to Nichibutsu, which players did not widely notice until five or six years after release; Sato later credited that hidden signature with Jorudan’s belated recognition abroad as the game’s developer.⁷

The game’s design credits have been attributed to Shigeki Fujiwara? (and, for the Atari version, Alex Leavens).¹³ Crazy Climber has been described as a precursor to the platform game genre and as the first video game built around climbing — specifically climbing buildings — predating Nintendo’s Donkey Kong? by one year.¹³²³ Its climbing, grunting, and chest-beating ape sounds were later reused in the bootleg Crazy Kong.²¹

Ports and legacy

Crazy Climber was ported to a range of systems, most of which never left Japan.²³ Home conversions include the Emerson Arcadia 2001? and Atari 2600, both in 1982, followed by a Famicom? version in 1986 and an X68000? release in 1993.¹³ The Atari 2600 port was begun by Joe Gaucher at Roklan as that studio’s first Atari contract.²² An arcade sequel, Crazy Climber 2, followed, and Jorudan was not involved in it or in the Famicom conversion.⁷ A retrospective review characterized the game as an “underappreciated innovator” whose non-intuitive controls, while off-putting to newcomers, produced an unusual sense of immersion and precariousness, likening the experience to “a paranoid dream state”.¹⁸

Hamster Corporation? reissued the game in its Arcade Archives series, bringing it to modern consoles: a PlayStation 4? release on May 26, 2015, and a Nintendo Switch version priced at US$7.99 as of July 2026, both with online high-score leaderboards and adjustable difficulty.¹⁵¹⁴ The PlayStation 4 release held an average user rating of 4.26 out of 5 from 457 ratings as of July 2026.¹⁵ Nichibutsu, founded in 1970 and long known by the nickname “Nichibutsu,” ceased operations in 2009.⁷ Original Crazy Climber cabinets remain collectible, with a Taito-cabinet machine offered for US$3,995 as of July 2026.¹⁹