The History of 2D Platformers

The 2D platformer is a genre of video game in which a player-controlled character runs and jumps across a two-dimensional environment of suspended platforms, ladders, and obstacles, using only the horizontal and vertical axes of movement.³⁷ Platformers are commonly classified as a subgenre of action games and count among the earliest game genres, having retained their popularity across four decades.⁷ They are conventionally divided into two types: single-screen platformers, which display each level as one static screen, and scrolling (or side-scrolling) platformers, in which the screen follows the character as it approaches the edge of the display.⁷⁸ The single-screen restriction of the earliest titles was itself a product of the technical limitations of consoles in the 1980s and early 1990s, which kept the games relatively basic and, as a consequence, unusually accessible to newcomers.³

Origins in the “climbing games”

The genre’s roots lie in a cluster of arcade titles collectively known at the time as “climbing games,” which established movement left and right, the climbing of ladders or buildings, and falling.¹⁷ In November 1980 two such games reached arcades: Crazy Climber, developed by Nichibutsu? and published by Taito?, in which the player scales a tall skyscraper while dodging slippery windows, thrown objects, a giant bird that drops eggs, a punching gorilla, electrical wires, and falling debris, with a helicopter waiting at the top of each floor to carry the player to the next level.¹ Crazy Climber sold well commercially, particularly in Japan, despite competing against arcade juggernauts such as Galaxian? and Pac-Man.¹ The second, Space Panic, developed by Universal? (with CVS Electronics) and published by Coleco?, cast the player on an alien planet, digging holes in one of five ladder-connected platforms to trap aliens and then whacking them with a shovel, under an oxygen meter that functioned as a level timer.¹⁶ Space Panic is frequently credited as the first platform game, though it had no jump button, a limitation later writers regarded as removing considerable potential from the design.³⁴⁸⁶ It was a hit in Japan but an obscure non-event in United States arcades.¹⁶ Space Panic received a home port on the ColecoVision and Crazy Climber was later brought to platforms including the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo Famicom.¹

Jumping — the mechanic that would define the genre — arrived with Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, which first released in arcades in July 1981.¹ The player climbs buildings, runs along platforms, ascends ladders, and jumps across gaps and over obstacles to rescue Pauline from a giant gorilla.¹ The playable character, later named Mario, was originally called “Jumpman”.¹⁸ Donkey Kong is widely regarded as the first true platformer, and its design visibly inherited elements from both Crazy Climber and Space Panic.¹⁴ Its designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, originally used the term “athletic games” to describe the form.⁸ The game is credited with catapulting Nintendo into popularity and with saving Nintendo of America, and it was packaged with the ColecoVision, whose sales surged as a result.¹² Each of Donkey Kong’s four levels was locked to a single screen, as was typical of arcade games of the era.¹ Its success spawned a franchise, with Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong 3, and eventually Mario Bros., which added cooperative platforming.⁴

The arrival of scrolling

Scrolling arrived within the same year. In December 1981, Jump Bug — developed by Alpha Denshi? (with Hoei Corporation) and published by Sega — cast the player as a bouncing car navigating buildings, hills, and clouds; it scrolled horizontally and vertically, allowed free movement, let the player control the height of a jump and the speed of descent, and used slower-moving clouds to create an early form of parallax scrolling.¹⁶ Some sections of Jump Bug were effectively autoscrolling, others gave free movement, an arrangement observers found impressive for 1981.¹ In 1982, Jungle Hunt? and Moon Patrol further refined side-scrolling and jumping, the former notable for right-to-left movement and swimming, the latter for multi-layered parallax backgrounds; in both, jumping served only to avoid obstacles rather than to leap between platforms.¹ That same year Activision’s Pitfall! built wide levels out of connected screens the player could move freely between; it sold around four million copies on the Atari 2600 — a figure the third-party publisher’s contemporaries had not previously matched — and put the young company on the map.¹²⁸ Donkey Kong’s success spawned a string of imitators and successors between 1982 and 1983, among them Miner 2049er, Kangaroo, Congo Bongo, and Donkey Kong Jr., many of which introduced new concepts even as they followed the template.⁶⁴ Titles that continued through 1983 either followed these designs or reverted to the single-screen model of Donkey Kong.¹

Namco?’s Pac-Land? (1984), built to match the aesthetic of the animated Pac-Man television show, combined the accumulated innovations of the preceding years and made prominent use of parallax scrolling, a feature that let backgrounds move more slowly than foregrounds to create depth and would become standard in franchises such as Mario.¹⁴ The ColecoVision’s 1983 launch had earlier offered a simpler scrolling platformer in Quest for Tires.⁴ The genre reached maturity in September 1985 with Super Mario Bros., directed, produced, and co-designed by Miyamoto for the NES, which brought side-scrolling levels, memorable foes, boss battles, secret paths, and power-ups to a mass audience; the limited power of the NES allowed only horizontal scrolling.⁴⁶ The game has sold some 58 million copies worldwide and is credited with helping to revive the industry after the 1983 market crash.⁶ Its opening stage, World 1-1, became a touchstone of level design for the way it teaches the player its mechanics through natural inquisitiveness rather than instruction, all within roughly thirty seconds.⁶

Expansion and rivalry

Later NES-era titles diversified the genre: Mega Man mixed shooting with platforming, Metroid emphasized exploration and adventure, and Capcom’s Bionic Commando introduced the grappling hook and multi-directional scrolling, both of which became staples.⁴ On personal computers, id Software’s Commander Keen? was touted as the first PC platformer with scrolling graphics and inspired later titles including Apogee’s Duke Nukem and Epic’s Jazz Jackrabbit.⁴

The 16-bit generation turned the genre into the front line of a console war. Sega’s Genesis reached market in 1989, two years ahead of the Super NES, showcasing titles such as Capcom’s Strider.⁴ Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog introduced a faster style of play and a mascot to rival Mario, launching the competition between the Genesis and the Super NES, and spawning imitators such as Bubsy and Aero the Acro-Bat, while Nintendo’s own Super Mario World? showcased enhanced parallax scrolling, larger levels, and more detailed sprites.²⁴ The rivalry continued through Sonic the Hedgehog 2 — which introduced a multiplayer mode — and Sonic 3, while the TurboGrafx-16 answered with Hudson’s Bonk’s Adventure?, the most famous game on that system.² Rare’s Donkey Kong Country, which took a risk on expensive pre-rendered graphics after Nintendo purchased the studio, is credited by some with ending that rivalry.²⁴ Other 16-bit standouts included Super Metroid?, Rayman, and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, along with Sega’s Sonic & Knuckles, while Castlevania: Symphony of the Night took cues from Metroid to help define what would become the “Metroidvania” style.⁴

As 3D became the industry’s buzzword in the mid-1990s, many developers adopted a “2.5D” approach — 3D graphics presented on a 2D plane — in titles such as Clockwork Knight, Pandemonium, and Klonoa, before the genre largely migrated into true 3D with games like Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot?.⁴⁸ Earlier games such as the 1983 Congo Bongo? had anticipated this by dressing a single-screen platformer in the illusion of depth, letting the player move forward and back as well as up and down.⁸ The 2D platformer declined on consoles thereafter, surviving on handhelds chiefly through Game Boy Advance re-releases of the older Mario games while consoles offered only 3D Mario; some accounts attribute the retreat to console makers such as Sony favoring games that showed off their hardware.² The form later revived in the independent-game scene, where its accessible, tightly designed levels remained popular.³ Nintendo’s continued output in the genre, culminating in Super Mario Bros. Wonder (2023), attests to its persistence.¹⁶

The indie revival

The 2D platformer’s return to prominence was led not by the major publishers that had established it but by independent developers, who from the late 2000s reintroduced the stripped-back, precise experiences that had defined the genre’s early years.⁹ The revival began, somewhat unexpectedly, on the shooter-dominated PC and Xbox 360 platforms.¹⁰ Braid?, released in 2008, was regarded as a landmark for combining platforming with puzzle mechanics built around the manipulation of time, demonstrating that the long-established genre still had unexplored territory.¹⁰ It was followed by Super Meat Boy?, developed by the Santa Cruz–based studio Team Meat and released on the Xbox Live Arcade service, which drew critical acclaim for its demanding gameplay.¹⁰¹¹ Super Meat Boy inverted the genre’s conventions with very small, fast-paced levels of escalating difficulty; observers attributed its tolerance for frustration to level designs that were intuitive to understand if not to execute, so that a player who died repeatedly always knew what was required and lacked only the precision to achieve it.¹¹ Other early titles cited as reinvigorating the form include VVVVVV and Limbo, the latter a puzzle platformer noted for its atmosphere.¹¹

The indie wave introduced mechanical innovations that distinguished individual titles within a genre long criticized as prone to staleness.¹¹ Downwell, released in 2015, exemplified this experimentation.⁹ Established studios also drew directly on the aesthetics and design ethos of the 8-bit era: Shovel Knight, developed by Yacht Club Games and released in 2014 following a successful Kickstarter campaign, took inspiration from Castlevania, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Mega Man, returning to the core of satisfying, precise platforming while building on what had come before.⁹ By the mid-2010s the influx of side-scrolling titles onto digital download platforms was extensive, with Rex Rocket, Guacamelee!?, and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams among the many releases, to the point that some observers considered the indie scene close to saturation with the genre.¹⁰ Later releases such as Celeste continued the trend of tightly designed, precision-focused platformers.⁹

The commercial success of these indie titles prompted established developers to return to the genre as well.¹⁰ The Wii and Wii U saw major 2D releases including New Super Mario Bros. U and Donkey Kong Country Returns, while Sega revisited the form with Sonic the Hedgehog 4 and reintroduced 2D levels into its 3D games Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations.¹⁰ Many of these titles incorporated novel elements — from procedural generation to physics-based puzzles — in an effort to keep the format from becoming stale while preserving the compulsive gameplay that had made platforming popular.¹⁰

Over its history the platformer also branched into recognized subgenres, among them run-and-gun platformers such as Contra? and Metal Slug, puzzle platformers such as The Lost Vikings, isometric platformers such as Congo Bongo and Zaxxon, and auto-runner platformers such as Moon Patrol and Temple Run.⁸

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